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.”
Swahili 2017
Posted Date
April 12, 2021