The Arusha Working Papers in African Linguistics

In 2017, CLS Alumni Development Fund recipient Troy Spier (Swahili 2017) and several African colleagues who sought a venue for advanced graduate students and junior scholars to share their work founded the Arusha Working Papers in African Linguistics, an open-access journal. In recent years, Troy and his colleagues formed an editorial board, reached out to universities across Africa, developed an online presence, and initiated the peer-review process. With 2020 ADF support, they are releasing the third volume. Like many, Troy and his colleagues have found COVID-19 to pose serious challenges to their process. However, they nonetheless found success with their project this year as they updated their online presence, standardized the submission guidelines, created a template for potential authors, and beta-tested a new submission and review system, and created a working mailing list of almost two hundred African scholars who work directly with African languages, linguistics, and/or literature.

“We are extremely excited to release the third volume around the start of January, especially because we have received many high-quality submissions from subfields and/or languages that differ from those already discussed in the prior two volumes. For instance, we have received our first multi-author submission, our first article that deals with computational linguistic approaches to Bantu languages, and a variety of articles on sociolinguistic issues in East and South Africa. We are grateful to the CLS Alumni Development Fund for allowing us to continue this pivotal work.”