Prof. Ruth Kramer receives NSF grant for African language workshop

Ruth Kramer received an NSF grant in Spring 2019 to hold the 3rd Afranaph Project Development Workshop at Georgetown in Fall 2019.

The Afranaph Project Development Workshop will provide a capstone event for the Afranaph Project by bringing together linguists from Africa, Europe and North America as they present their work at Georgetown University in the Fall of 2019. Building an active research community around electronic resources for the study of African languages has been a major goal of the Afranaph Project, which recruits native speaker linguist consultants (NSLCs) to contribute data in response to questionnaires that target particular areas of grammar of interest to theoretical linguistics.  This is done with a view toward discovering the subtleties of grammatical structures in under-reported languages (some of them endangered) and discovering patterns new to linguistic science. After 15 years, Afranaph now has almost 50 NSLCs participating and as many languages under investigation, with primary data from 34 languages freely posted online and in the ever-expanding Afranaph Database. The workshop will include reports from the leaders of the Afranaph research projects, new research from NSLCs and other researchers on languages in the Afranaph Project, and proposals for new directions for research employing Afranaph resources.