The annual meeting of the North Atlantic Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL) will be held at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO) in Paris, France (Central Paris, 2 Rue de Lille, Historical INALCO) from Wednesday, 30 September to Friday, 2 October 2026.  NACAL is an annual gathering featuring the presentation and discussion of original research on linguistic topics relevant to the languages of the Afroasiatic phylum (Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic, and Semitic). 

Organizing Committee 

Ahmad Al-Jallad  

Bruno Herin

Detailed Program [PDF]

Wednesday 30 September 2026

09:00–10:00 Coffee / accueil des participants

10:00–10:30 Welcome & opening remarks

Session 1 · Comparative & Historical Semitic 10:30–12:30

10:30–11:00

Simon Korneev

‘Emphatic umlaut’ and Proto-Semitic *ḥ *ʕ

11:00–11:30

Yishai Neuman

From physical harm to speech in Semitic: Distributed evidence for an embodied diachronic mapping

11:30–12:00

Roey Schneider

Use of /a/ as a theme vowel in T-stems across Semitic

12:00–12:30

Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee

The relationship of so-called “optatives” and counterfactual conditional clauses in Semitic

12:30–14:00 Lunch break

Session 2 · Berber (Amazigh) II, Egyptian & Coptic 14:00–15:30

14:00–14:30

Maarten G. Kossmann

How Amazigh (Berber) is Eastern Numidian phonology?

14:30–15:00

Chris Reintges & Ruth Kramer

The morphosyntax of regular and irregular plurals in Coptic

15:00–15:30

Joseph Lovestrand

Valency-altering verbal morphology in East Chadic languages

15:30–16:00 Coffee break

Session 3 · Arabic: Morphology, Templates & Contact 16:00–18:00

16:00–16:30

Giuliano Castagna

The pattern C1C2C3C2C3 in classical and spoken Arabic from a Semitic perspective: Form, semantics, and pragmatics

16:30–17:00

Khalsa Al-Aghbari

Exploring Omani Arabic templatic patterns

17:00–17:30

Lior Laks & Maha Nassar

Losing transitivity boundaries? Verb formation based on loanwords in Palestinian Arabic

17:30–18:00

Zuzanna Nabulssi

Corpus evidence for the functional expansion of the negator miš in written Egyptian Arabic

Thursday 1 October 2026

Session 4 · Northwest Semitic: Aramaic & Hebrew 9:30–11:00

09:30–10:00

Lutz Edzard

Primae yod (“pe yod”) and primae nun (“pe nun”) in Rabbinic and Mishnaic Hebrew

10:00–10:30

Matthew Morgenstern

On the vocalization traditions of Mandaic

10:30–11:00

Eran Cohen

The Late Babylonian forms iššū, iššī, iššunu, and iššini: A case of pattern replication from Aramaic

11:00–11:30 Coffee break

Session 5 · Semitic in Contact & Comparative Semitic 11:30–13:00

11:30–12:00

Mila Neishtadt

Aramaic /š/ in Arabic toponyms of the Levant

12:00–12:30

Julien Dufour

The ‘causative’ prefix of Semitic in the light of Modern South Arabian (MSA)

12:30–13:00

Cody Beasley

Anṭaynāka l-Kawthar: An interdisciplinary approach to Arabic variety

13:00–14:00 Lunch break

Session 6 · Modern South Arabian 14:00–15:30

14:00–14:30

Imar Koutchoukali

Prohibitive ʕan in and on the Indian Ocean: observations from Omani Arabic and Soqotri

14:30–15:00

Radwa Fathi

The external exponence of feminine gender in Omani Mehri

15:00–15:30

Amir Azad al-Kathiri & Anton Kungl

Personal names, nicknames and name-giving among the Jibbali/Shahri (gəblɛt̄/ɬħərɛt̄)-speaking communities of Dhofar

15:30–16:00 Coffee break

Session 7 · Scripts, Epigraphy & Writing Systems (+ Berber) 16:00–18:00

16:00–16:30

Benjamin Suchard

Reconstructing the North Semitic letter names

16:30–17:00

Ahmad Al-Jallad & Alessia Prioletta

The origins of the Ethiopic script reconsidered

17:00–17:30

Tal Bernstein, Letizia Cerqueglini & Shai Gordin

Modeling Egyptian–Phoenician lexical contact in epigraphic corpora

17:30–18:00

Kamal Nait Zerad

Suffixes expressifs en berbère

Keynote Address 18:00–19:30

18:00

Prof. Dr. Enam Al-Wer

University of Essex

Friday 2 October 2026

Session 8 · Berber (Amazigh) Linguistics I 9:30–11:00

09:30–10:00

Jeffrey Heath

Tamashek ablaut

10:00–10:30

Aicha Belkadi

On the grammaticalization and functions of discourse connectives: Examples from Taqbaylit Berber

10:30–11:00

Marijn van Putten

Berber “regularly irregular” long verbal noun prefixes in light of Zénaga Berber evidence

11:00–11:30 Coffee break

Session 9 · Arabic Dialectology & Sociolinguistics 11:30–13:00

11:30–12:00

Luca D’Anna

An ecolinguistic account of ق in Arabic before the q / g split

12:00–12:30

Phillip Stokes

An archaic modal distribution in some modern Arabic dialects and its implications for Central Semitic reconstruction

12:30–13:00

Adam Pospíšil

Secondary syntactic and pragmatic functions of auxiliary verbs in colloquial Arabic

13:00–14:00 Lunch break

Session 10 · Chadic & Cushitic 14:00–15:30

14:00–14:30

Joseph C. Lovestrand

Toward a typology of tense–aspect–mood in Chadic

14:30–15:00

Lameen Souag

Mubi morphology revisited in the light of sound change

15:00–15:30

Anbessa Teferra

An arrogant mouse said to a cat, “Come on, let’s wrestle.” A linguistic analysis of Sidaama wellerisms

15:30–16:00 Coffee break

Session 11 · Afro-Asiaitic Varia 16:00–17:30

16:00–16:30

Jean Lowenstamm

An ‘obscure’ class of verbs – Weak quadriradicals in Chaha

16:30–17:00

Maarten Mous, Derek Nurse, Bonny Sands, Mauro Tosco, Martin Walsh & Ed Elderkin

Dahalo(an) as the original language of the speakers of the Ma’á/Mbugu mixed language

17:00–17:30

Dominique Caubet

Pantelleria Araba? A little-described situation: 9th–19th century

17:30–18:00

Massinissa Garaoun

Enquête sur la toponymie amazighe d’origine anatomique des îles Canaries