The Afranaph Project Development Workshop: Washington, D.C., Fall 2019

Georgetown University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

The Afranaph Project aims to build an active research community around electronic resources for the study of African languages. For the past 15 years, native speaker consultants have been contributing data about particular areas of grammatical interest, with a view toward discovering grammatical structures in under-reported languages (some of them endangered) and uncovering patterns new to linguistic science. With data from almost 50 consultants and almost as many languages freely available online and in the Afranaph Database, Afranaph has become a valuable resource for a wide range of linguistic researchers, in addition to serving as a tool for linguistic pedagogy, a model for similar projects on other language areas, and a partner in language projects for non-scholarly communities (e.g., dictionaries for NGOs). In the Fall of 2019, the Afranaph Project Development Workshop will bring linguists from Africa, Europe and North America to Georgetown University in order to present their research. This capstone event will include reports from the leaders of the Afranaph research projects, new work from linguists investigating the languages of Afranaph, and proposals for new research directions employing Afranaph resources. Work by the native speaker consultants will be highlighted, since many of them are early career researchers who have less access to resources in their local communities, and can benefit from collaboration and engagement with each other and the western academic community. Overall, this workshop will allow researchers to explore the discoveries and strengthen the research community and infrastructure that Afranaph has developed. Moreover, it is a rare opportunity for new theoretical research on understudied African languages to be presented to an expert audience, where new empirical patterns can be identified and their impact on the field can be recognized. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.