Welcome to the West African Languages Institute (WALI)

In my role as director of the West African Languages Institute (WALI), I am delighted to have a chance to share a few words and thoughts about the institute. Founded by Distinguished Professor Emeritus Paul Newman in 1994, WALI is committed to the enterprise of doing extensive research on West African languages via an interaction with their native speakers and the greater community of linguists dedicated to the study of the languages of the West African sub-region. Our focus is on syntheses and analyses of the linguistic systems and structures of West African languages and the role the languages play in the daily lives of their speakers, in governance (leadership), and in development in the broadest sense. Come join us as we examine how these unique languages inform and are informed by development by getting to know more about their use in West African politics, law, education, healthcare, commerce, and in other important socio-cultural domains. We will take you through our work on language and terrorism and world peace, and how region/geography influences the development of dialects, sociolects, and other varieties that shape text and talk and fulfill the communicative needs of their speakers.

 

You will be intrigued by the efforts  our affiliated faculty and scholars undertake on language preservation (by developing copra using social media and through field work). This work includes writing grammatical sketches, building wordlists/dictionaries, indices, and interrogating literary genres (especially folktales and axioms such as proverbs).

Besides our work on system and structure, we are also planning to develop readers and expanding work on dictionaries in:

(a) such languages of wider communication as Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Urhobo (Nigeria), Wolof (Senegal) Akan (Ghana), Pidgin and Creole Englishes (Ghana, Nigeria, Gambia, Liberia and Sierra Leone), etc.;

(b) smaller languages that are either under-described or undocumented;

(c) machine translation and building corpus of and for selected West African languages.

Our work on ethnopragmatics will definitely appeal to those interested in the intersection between language, society, and culture. Some of our members in this sub-field work on the structure and pragmatics of African names (personal, place, rivers, etc.), surrogate languages, and on the role of text and context in the articulation of ‘meaning’ beyond formal semantics in selected speech acts in informal and institutional domains. Again, come join us to learn about and contribute to the research on the structure, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics of these languages, as well as their (the languages) articulation of various forms of identity.