Department of Linguistics

• African languages
• Chadic
• Hausa
• historical linguistics
• tonology
• syllable structure
• linguistic fieldwork
• language and law
• copyright
• First Amendment law

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Paul Newman received his B.A. (Philosophy) and M.A. (Anthropology) from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. (Linguistics) from UCLA. Newman also has a law degree (J.D., summa cum laude) from Indiana University. He is a member of the Indiana Bar.

He has held academic and administrative positions at Yale University, Abdullahi Bayero College (now Bayero University), Nigeria; University of Leiden, The Netherlands, and the University of Michigan, where he was Senior Copyright Specialist for the library system. His major appointment was in the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University, where he worked from 1983 until his retirement in 2005, including six years as Chair of the department. At IU he created and served as director of the West African Languages Institute. His areas of specialization in teaching and research include African languages (especially Hausa), historical linguistics, tone, field methods, lexicography, and language and law.

Newman was the founding editor of the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, now into its 44th year, and a charter member of the advisory board of the journal Language Documentation & Conservation. He has also served on the editorial boards of Language, Current Anthropology, and Studies in African Linguistics.

Newman is regarded as the pre-eminent scholar on the Chadic family as a whole and on the Hausa language in particular. Throughout his career, he has been the recipient of numerous honors, notably having been named Distinguished Professor at Indiana University in 2002 and recipient of the Bicentennial Medal of Honor in 2020. Other national and international honors and invitations include Personal Chair in African Linguistics, University of Leiden; Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford; Research Fellow, Centre for Linguistic Typology, Australian National University; Visiting Professor, Indiana-Hamburg Exchange Program; Visiting Professor, University of Bayreuth; and Fulbright Specialist in Law, University of Haifa. He has been plenary speaker at a number of major conferences including ACAL-23 (Michigan State University), Second World Congress of African Linguistics (Leipzig), First International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (Honolulu), and Workshop on Nominal and Verbal Plurality (Paris).

He has had three books published in his honor: Chadic and Hausa Linguistics: Selected Papers of Paul Newman, with Commentaries, ed. by Philip J. Jaggar and H. Ekkehard Wolff (2002) and Topics in Descriptive and African Linguistics: Essays in Honor of Distinguished Professor Paul Newman, ed. by Samuel Gyasi Obeng (2009), and African Linguistics in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Paul Newman, ed. by Samuel Gyasi Obeng and Christopher R. Green (2017). At the 48th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) held in Bloomington in 2017, Newman was presented with a Distinguished Research Scholar Award in recognition of his significant contribution to African and general linguistics.

He is a life member of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), for which he served on the Endangered Languages Committee and the Social and Political Issues Committee. He volunteered for a number of years as Special Counsel to the Society, dealing primarily with copyright and related legal and policy issues regarding online publication, in appreciation of which he was honored with the Linguistic Service Award (2012).

Outside the university context, Newman has long been active in the ACLU of Indiana, where he served for a number of years on the Board of Directors and as Vice-President for litigation. He is also a life member and ardent supporter of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Newman is married to Dr. Roxana Newman, former Assistant Dean of International Programs and an accomplished Africanist linguist in her own right. They have one son, Michael Abraham Newman.

Newman is a prolific scholar who has published over twenty books and approximately 140 articles, book reviews, and sound recordings.

Books

A History of the Hausa Language: Reconstruction and Pathways to the Present. Cambridge University Press (2022)

Comprehensive Bibliography of Chadic and Hausa Lingusitics, 5th edition. Bloomington: IUScholarWorks (2022)

[with Roxana Ma Newman] Hausa Dictionary (Hausa-English•English-Hausa) Bayero University Press & African Books Collective (2020/2022)

[editor] Syllable Weight in African Languages. John Benjamins (2017)

Klingenheben’s Law in Hausa. Rüdiger Köppe (2004)

[editor, with Martha Ratliff] Linguistic Fieldwork. Cambridge University Press (2001)

The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar. Yale University Press (2000)

Nominal and Verbal Plurality in Chadic. Foris Publications (1990)

[with Roxana Ma Newman] Modern Hausa-English Dictionary. Oxford University Press (Nigeria) (1977)

Articles, reviews + sound recordings

[with Roxana Ma Newman] "An interview with Paul Newman," Brill's Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 14 (2022)

"Hausa and the Chadic Languages," in The World's Major Languages, 3rd edition, ed. by Bernard Comrie. Routledge (2018)

"The range and beauty of internal reconstruction: Probing Hausa linguistic history," Studies of the Department of African Languages and Cultures [Warsaw] 48 (2014)

“Copyright and other legal concerns,” in The Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork, ed. by Nicholas Thieberger. Oxford University Press (2012)

"Fieldwork and field methods in linguistics," Language Documentation & Conservation 3 (2009)

[with Alan Kaye] “An interview with Paul Newman,“ Semiotica 166 (2007)

“An interview with Joseph Greenberg,” Current Anthropology 32 (1991)

[with Eric H. Davidson & Lyn Davidson] “Music from the Villages of Northeastern Nigeria,” Asch Mankind Series AHM–4532 (1971)

A large number of his articles and book reviews are available open access in IU’s digital repository, see https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/20837.