Three CFPs: LESEWA, FEL XX, and ICRIML

This is the fourth in a string of posts on conferences and workshops relevant to, or specifically addressing, African languages. Only one event of all of those mentioned, however, is in Africa. More on that at the end of the post, but first the three upcoming conferences for which there are active CFPs (calls for papers/participation). The subject of the first, LESEWA, is on similarities between a number of West African and East Asian languages - a theme that has long interested me as a learner of Bambara and Chinese (Mandarin). The latter two deal with a broad set of languages of generally disadvantaged status and fewer speakers, among which many African languages can be counted. The first two events are the latest of long-running conference series; the third is brand new.

LESEWA

The International Conference on Languages of Far East, Southeast Asia and West Africa (LESEWA) will be held in Moscow, Russia on 16-17 November 2016. This is the latest in a series of biennial conferences that began in 1990 (I am told that the idea began with Prof. Vadim Kasevich and colleagues). The CFP deadline is 1 July 2016.

LESEWA "will focus on the remarkable far-reaching parallelism in syntactic and semantic structures of the languages of the Far East, Southeast Asia and West Africa, which can be explained neither by genealogical affinity, nor by aerial factors. Both individual language investigations and typological studies are encouraged. General phonetic and general linguistics themes are especially welcome."

FEL XX

FEL XX Hyderabad (the 20th conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages) will be held at the University of Hyderabad in India on 2-5 December 2016. Its theme is "Language colonization and endangerment: Long-term effects, echoes and reactions." The CFP deadline has been moved back to 1 July 2016 (the conference date was also changed).

FEL XX "aims to examine language endangerment during the colonial era, and the impact of colonization on the subsequent efforts of the independent nations and communities to revitalize their language heritage. The conference will look at continuity and change in approaches to language use." The concept of "colonialism" is broad, including not only expansion of European rule, but also historically earlier periods of domination by one people over others.

ICRIML

The First International Conference on Revitalization of Indigenous and Minoritized Languages will be held in Barcelona, Spain, on 19-21 April 2017. It is co-sponsored by the Universitat de Barcelona, Universitat de Vic-Universitat Central de Catalunya, and Indiana University-Bloomington. The deadline for proposals is 30 July 2016.

"The mission of the conference is to bring together instructors, practitioners, activists, Indigenous leaders, scholars and learners who speak and study these [indigenous and minoritized] languages. This international conference includes research, pedagogy and practice about the diverse languages and cultures of Indigenous and minoritized populations worldwide."

Language conferences and Africa

As noted above, of the nine events spotlighted in this and the previous three posts, all but one are outside of Africa (that one is in South Africa). To be fair, not all of them deal specifically with African languages. But in general one may fairly ask how many conferences on languages and linguistics - be they Africa focused or global in scope - take place in Africa, one of the most multilingual continents. No clear answer to offer here, but if one were to do a count, it might help to go about the task with attention to types of conferences - academic vs. policy vs. workshop-type - and to the subjects - general or focused on Africa. I have the impression that quite a number of events - conferences, expert meetings, etc. - dealing with policy and practical aspects of African language use have been held in various parts of Africa, as one would expect. On the other hand, academic conferences, whatever the topic - even African languages and linguistics - are more frequent in the Northern countries due to the number of institutions and scholars, and resources available to them for convening such events. General conferences on topics like ICT4D or endangered languages might be located anywhere, and conference series with significant African content and potential participation do seem to try to alternate regional locations to include some in Africa.

All of which is to say that my unscientific sampling of nine events may not tell us much about the choices of location of conferences on or relating to African languages. Nevertheless, it seemed worth addressing the topic given the apparent discrepancy in geographic representation.

Early Writing in Indigenous Languages

On the theme of the importance of stories, I thought I'd pass on a call for chapters for an academic publication on writing by children in their first languages. The scope is global, including Africa. It is announced by Dr. Arieh Sherris, who is currently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Education, Winneba, in Ghana.

From the call:

The lion’s share of the world’s living languages face a bleak future. A growing consensus of linguists predicts that by the close of the 21^st century 50-90% will disappear. Efforts to reverse this trend are underway worldwide. The purpose of this edited volume is to provide case studies of revitalization efforts at schooling early writing among children between approx. 3 and 12 years in lesser-known languages from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

For those interested, the full call is available on the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) website.

Had an interesting exchange re the Gutenberg Project's interest in including works in African languages in its collection of e-books. I've long thought that weblishing older published material in various African languages, such as the old Classiques Africaines series, would be an easy way to get some good quality content on the web. This may seem somewhat far from applications related to development, the long-term focus of Bisharat (link at left, under "Other Links, Work"), but in fact any quality African language material in my opinion helps achieve a kind of "critical mass" making the addition of other temporary, current and targeted material easier. In the case of some of this material, it may also serve to help set the high-end standard for web-content in some languages.

There's a fair amount, from my recollection of some bibliographic work, but mostly it's tucked away in university libraries in the north, inaccessible in any form on the continent.

This all seems to be the result of connections made by Djilali Benamrane, formerly of UNDP, with a very positive response from Michael Hart, the director of Gutenberg. More on this later, hopefully.

The NYTimes Magazine had a piece yesterday on disappearing languages, "Say no more." I posted the following quick reaction on a small MSN list on which the link was posted, Language and Development (the link was also posted later on ILAT). If you understand Bambara, the first line attempts to play off the article title "Say no more":

N'ka kan ka kuma kelen fɔ...

But first, thanks for this article, which I had not seen.

We hear a lot about disappearing languages, those that have 6 speakers like Kawesqar, some with 30-some speakers others with a few hundred. These are important matters, but most of us cannot do much directly.

At the same time I'm convinced that there are dangerous processes at play for languages that have tens or hundreds of thousands, or even 1 or 2 million. When languages are not taught at school, when people don't bother to teach the mother tongue to their children, when the popular idea is that the indigenous languages are somehow inferior, then the writing is on the wall. In the meantime, long before language extinction becomes a concern, I think there is a certain amount of "language impoverishment." I've known native speakers of Bambara and Fulfulde who have baldly stated that there is no word for such-and-such in their language, when in fact I as a language learner know that there is one or more. Two examples:

1. A Bambara speaker, telling me that Bambara was not suited for science, only "dialogue" gave as an example that there is no word for research ("recherche" in French, the language he was comparing it to) - but in fact one can say (correct me if I'm wrong!) ɲini, literally to look for, or sɛgɛsɛgɛli, which has the sense of really getting to the bottom of things.

2. A Fulfulde speaker who didn't know the word for "blind person" - bumɗo - but instead only knew how to say neɗɗo mo yiyataa - person who can't see.

3. A Hausa agricultural researcher in Niger who spoke impeccable French, but mastered her first language less well than an American colleague who had spent 3 years in the country.

Many times I've chatted with people who've been through the formal schooling system (almost all in Africa use only English or French) who have remarked how their elders could talk above their heads in their common maternal language.

It seems that this is a process happening all over. As an outsider looking at it, it is tragic (the consequences of colonization) and puzzling. Many African languages are numerically as important as official languages in Europe like Dutch, Danish, Catalan, and many in East Europe, but are not used in education. There are probably more webpages in Basque or Welsh than in any African language. Etc.

There are a lot of disadvantages Africa and its socio-economies, that is to be sure, but ultimately it's up to Africans to decide about aspects of language and culture on the continent.

It may be helpful to know that there are ways to revitalize African languages and keep the usefulness of the international languages. Bilingual education - at home, in the community, and in school - has been shown to benefit children. And there is international interest in bolstering education in Africa, which African authorities can direct toward approaches that include use of children's first languages.

All that said, there are certainly minority languages in Africa that are in danger of disappearing. Some of this in Africa as elsewhere is ultimately unavoidable. But a beginning point to dealing with this part of the situation is to understand how many such languages there are, and before that even, to understand what is a separate language and what is a dialect of a larger language.

N'y'a sɔrɔ yan, n'y'a bila yen...