The Afranaph Project: Anaphora in the African Languages

The main goal of the Afranaph Project, as it is presently constituted, is to develop rich descriptions of a wide range of African languages in order to serve the interests of linguistic research into the nature and distribution of empirical patterns in natural language. The first project of our website, and still the one that is the mainstay of our research, has been to explore the distribution of anaphoric morphology and interpretation, but recent initiatives to expand the role of our empirical investigations to other sorts of linguistic phenomena will soon result in sister projects, autonomous, but linked to Afranaph in spirit, by infrastructure, and with respect to a common database.

In order to provide optimal access to the data we have elicited, the Afranaph Database was designed to permit online search and manipulation of the data stored in the extensive responses to our various questionnaires and the additional data elicited in follow-up inquiries. In those domains and for those languages for which we have complete data sets, the database permits fine-grained searches to aid in the analysis of both language-internal and crosslinguistic generalizations.

We are pleased to announce that the Kinande Dictionary Fund has achieved its goal! In December, 2011, 550 copies of the Kinande/Konzo-English Dictionary were shipped to Kampala, Uganda by the Africa World Press and eventually reached the hands of our distributors there. We would like to thank everyone involved for their assistance, including the Endangered Language Fund, which handled our donations.

Ngessimo Mathe Mutaka is a full professor of linguistics at the University of Yaounde 1, Cameroon. He graduated at the University of Southern California Los Angeles, in 1990. His Ph.D. thesis entitled the Lexical tonology of Kinande (223p) has been published by Lincom Europa. He is the author of the Kinande-English Dictionary/ Dictionnaire Kinande-Français with late Kambale Kavutirwaki. The English version of this dictionary that comprises useful grammatical notes on Kinande is published on the Afranaph website. The French version will soon be available on the website of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium). His publications include An Introduction to African linguistics (317p), Research mate in African linguistics: focus on Cameroon. A fieldworker’s tool for deciphering the stories Cameroonian languages have to tell (360p), Building capacity: using TEFL and African languages as development-oriented literacy tools (193p), more than forty papers of linguistics published in recognized journals, and two books on AIDS prevention in both English and French.

Contact Info:
Ngessimo Mathe Mutaka
Dept of Linguistics,
Univ. of Yaounde 1,
P.O. Box 755
Yaounde, Cameroon
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Contact The Project:

Ken Safir, Director
Afranaph Project

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
18 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Phone: 732.932.7289
Fax: 732.932.1370
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