The Afranaph Project: Anaphora in the African Languages

To become a consultant to the Afranaph project, you have to be a native speaker of a non-Colonial language of Africa and a trained linguist. Participation in our project is voluntary and non-contractual. We do pay our consultants for various levels of participation, but the reality of the situation is that we cannot pay what the work is worth. Besides the general benefit your participation will bring to the linguistic research community, we like to think we are providing our consultants with an opportunity that brings their efforts for the project, their language, and other work they have done, to the attention of a wider world community of linguists interested in a broad range of theoretical and (to a lesser extent) practical questions. If you are a young scholar and you  want to enter the world community of Africanist linguists, theoretical linguists and typologists, or both, it is not unrealistic to view your participation in our project as making a contribution that will be unique and significant. If you are already part of that community, then you know what your potential contribution is worth and we hope you will take this opportunity to share it with us. Although it is possible and anticipated that some linguists may choose not to reveal their identities in order to participate in the project, we find that most of our consultants do wish to be known, and some of these consultants may be asked to contribute to some of the other aspects of our case files, including the grammar sketch, collaborations with directors of the Afranaph Sister Projects, the translated tale (with morpheme breakdowns and glosses) the bibliography and so forth.

There are now a variety of Afranaph Sister Projects that consultants can participate in. Participation in any one project, specifically by filling out a questionnaire for it, does not require participation in any of the other projects, but we encourage our consultants to participate in as many projects as possible so that a broader picture of their language can emerge from the data that our project can put on view. If, after reviewing one or more of the questionnaires and checking out the remuneration possibilities you have decided to participate, then the next page to consult is the Consultant’s Page, where more detailed instructions for participation are available.