35.656, Calls: Language Acquisition / First Language (Jrnl)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-656. Sun Feb 25 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.656, Calls: Language Acquisition / First Language (Jrnl)

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Date: 23-Feb-2024
From: Serge Sagna [serge.sagna at manchester.ac.uk]
Subject: Language Acquisition / First Language (Jrnl)


 Call for papers for a special issue of First Language

The acquisition of African languages

Guest editors: Birgit Hellwig (University of Cologne, Germany), Evan
Kidd (Australian National University, Australia), Serge Sagna
(University of Manchester, UK)



The field of child language acquisition has a long history of
crosslinguistic research, highlighting the importance of taking into
account the many ways that languages vary when building theoretical
models of the acquisition process. This history includes pioneering
work on African Bantu languages that dates back to the 1980s and
contributed important insights on the acquisition of agglutinating
languages with complex noun class systems (see Demuth 2003). However,
Kidd and Garcia (2022) recently reported that while research on
less-commonly studied languages is increasing, our evidential base is
still severely skewed towards English and other Indo-European
languages. In an analysis of four major child language journals
spanning 45 years of research, they found that there are only papers
on around 103 of the world’s current 7,000 languages. For the African
continent, there were only 22 papers on the acquisition of 11
indigenous languages published in those four journals, with the vast
majority focusing on seven Bantu languages (17 papers). It is obvious
that such a small sample cannot lay claims to being representative of
the enormous diversity of the 2,000 or so African languages spoken and
signed today.

Over the last decade, research on the acquisition of African languages
has attracted renewed interest, with a number of recent and on-going
projects investigating acquisition trajectories in a wider variety of
languages. It is the aim of this special issue to showcase the vibrant
research activities by bringing together contemporary research on
first language acquisition of non-Indo-European languages indigenous
to Africa, including sign languages, creole languages, as well as
Austronesian languages of Madagascar and the surrounding areas. We
adopt a broad focus, soliciting contributions that target the
acquisition of any level of language (phonology, tonology and prosody,
morphology and syntax, vocabulary and semantics, pragmatics and
discourse, multimodal communication), focus on monolingual or
multilingual settings, or cover child-directed language.

If you are interested in contributing a paper to the special issue,
please submit an abstract (200 words) to bhellwig at uni-koeln.de by
April 15, 2024; we will notify you about the outcome by April 30,
2024. Any enquiries should also be sent to this address.

If the topic is appropriate for inclusion within the special issue, we
will expect the submitted manuscript by November 30, 2024.



Demuth, Katherine. 2003. The acquisition of Bantu languages. In Derek
Nurse & Gérard Philippson (eds.), The Bantu languages, 209-222.
London & New York: Routledge.

Kidd, Evan & Rowena Garcia. 2022. How diverse is child language
acquisition research? First Language 42(6). 703-735.



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