US-Cameroon Workshop on Sociolinguistic Language Documentation in Sub-Saharan Africa in Conjunction with the Seventh World Congress of African Linguistics, August 2012

CNIC: U.S.-Cameroon Workshop on Sociolinguistic Language Documentation in Sub-Saharan Africa in Conjunction with the Seventh World Congress of African Linguistics (WOCAL), August 2012 This award supports a catalytic activity initiated by Dr. Jeffrey Good, State University of New York at Buffalo with Dr. Pius Tamanji, Department of African Languages and Linguistics, University of Yaoundé, Cameroon to promote new international collaborations with African scholars. To that end, the US-Cameroon workshop on sociolinguistic language documentation in Sub-Saharan Africa will be held in conjunction with the Seventh World Congress of African Linguistics in August 2012. Coordination of the workshop with a major international conference where leading scholars present their research and plan future projects is the ideal intellectual setting to maximize the impact of the three-day workshop and draw attention to sociolinguistic language documentation as an important area for research. The focus on Sub-Saharan Africa where there are complex dynamics between societies and languages provides unique opportunities as well as an ideal testing ground for developing theories and models for sociolinguistic language documentation. Selected working group reports will be prepared for publication and made available online. Most importantly, the development of specific research projects and partnerships is an expected outcome of this workshop. More broadly, the workshop will include U.S. graduate students, a significant number of African scholars, and participants from under-represented groups in research. Tutorials will be held on relevant sociolinguistic topics during the WOCAL to provide attendees training opportunities. The focus on a largely unexplored research topic with applications to work on language planning and maintenance make it of potential benefit to under-resourced language groups within Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. Especially significant is that the results of this workshop are likely to be of interest to Africans concerned with issues of language policy and education, where a better understanding of the social context of multilingualism would be of high value. This award is jointly funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the SBE/BCS Documenting Endangered Languages Program.