37.2470, FYI: Call for Chapters: Phonetics and Artificial Intelligent in Africa: Speech, Language Technology and the Future of African Linguistics

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2470. Thu Jul 23 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2470, FYI: Call for Chapters: Phonetics and Artificial Intelligent in Africa: Speech, Language Technology and the Future of African Linguistics

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Date: 23-Jul-2026
From: Samwel Komenda [skomenda at kisiiuniversity.ac.ke]
Subject: Call for Chapters: Phonetics and Artificial Intelligent in Africa: Speech, Language Technology and the Future of African Linguistics


BOOK PROPOSAL TITLE:
Phonetics and Artificial Intelligence in Africa: Speech, Language
Technology, and the Future of African Linguistics
Editors: Dr. Evans Gesura Mecha & Dr. Samwel Komenda
Correspondence: evans-mecha at kisiiuniversity.ac.ke
1. Working Title
Phonetics and Artificial Intelligence in Africa: Speech, Language
Technology, and the Future of African Linguistics
2. Rationale and Overview
Africa's linguistic landscape, with an estimated 2,000 languages
exhibiting tone systems, click consonants, extensive dialectal
variation, and pervasive multilingualism, represents both a formidable
challenge and an under-explored opportunity for artificial
intelligence research. Global advances in automatic speech
recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and computational phonetics
have overwhelmingly been developed around a small number of
well-resourced languages, leaving African languages under-represented
in the datasets, models, and tools that increasingly mediate
communication, education, healthcare, and governance. At the same
time, a growing community of African and Africa-focused researchers is
producing original work on speech corpora, low-resource ASR, tonal and
click-consonant modelling, forensic phonetics, and language
documentation powered by AI. This work is often scattered across
conference proceedings, technical reports, and journals with limited
cross-disciplinary visibility. This edited volume proposes to bring
that scholarship together in a single, coherent collection that speaks
simultaneously to phoneticians, computational linguists, AI
practitioners, and policymakers. The book is distinctive in treating
phonetics not as a supporting detail for engineering work but as the
analytical core around which AI applications for African languages
should be designed. It approaches the subject from both directions:
how African phonetic phenomena challenge and extend existing AI
methods, and how AI methods can, in turn, advance phonetic research,
documentation, and revitalisation across the continent.
3. Aims and Objectives
- To consolidate current research on the intersection of phonetics and
AI in African language contexts.
- To document the specific phonetic and phonological challenges that
African languages pose for speech technologies, including tone,
clicks, vowel harmony, and dialectal variation.
- To showcase African-led and Africa-focused innovations in speech
corpus building, low-resource ASR and TTS, and computational phonetic
analysis.
- To examine the ethical, policy, and infrastructural conditions
shaping equitable speech-AI development on the continent.
- To provide a reference text usable in graduate courses in
linguistics, computational linguistics, and AI-for-development
programmes.
4. Scope and Unique Contribution
Existing literature on speech technology and AI tends to be organised
either around specific engineering problems (ASR architectures,
low-resource modelling techniques) or around general African language
documentation, with relatively little work placing phonetics itself at
the centre of the AI conversation. This volume fills that gap by
combining three strands that are rarely brought together in one text:
instrumental and theoretical phonetics of African languages, applied
AI system-building for those languages, and the policy and ethical
questions raised by deploying such systems at scale. Chapters will
combine empirical studies, technical contributions, and critical
analysis, giving the book relevance across linguistics departments,
computer science and engineering programmes, and policy institutions
working on digital language inclusion.
5. Target Audience
- Postgraduate students and researchers in phonetics, phonology, and
computational linguistics.
- AI and speech-technology researchers and engineers working on
low-resource and multilingual systems.
- Scholars of African languages, African studies, and language
documentation.
- Policymakers and NGO practitioners working on digital inclusion,
education technology, and language policy in Africa.
- University libraries and programmes offering courses in linguistics,
natural language processing, or African studies.
6. Positioning in the Existing Literature
Published scholarship in this space currently falls into two broad
camps: technical volumes on low-resource and multilingual natural
language processing that treat African languages as one case among
many worldwide, and linguistics volumes on African phonetics and
phonology that engage minimally with computational methods. This
proposal is positioned to bridge that divide, offering a text
organised specifically around the African context and around phonetics
as the point of departure, rather than treating either as a secondary
concern.
7. Proposed Structure and Themes
The volume will be organised into five parts, each comprising three to
five chapters selected through the accompanying call for chapters and
peer review.
Part I — Foundations: African Phonetics Meets AI
Acoustic and articulatory phonetics of African languages using
computational tools; typological overview of tone, clicks, and vowel
systems as they relate to speech-AI modelling.
Part II — Building Speech Technologies for African Languages
Automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis for
under-resourced languages; corpus development and phonetic annotation;
machine learning approaches to phonetic transcription.
Part III — Documentation, Multilingualism, and Variation
AI-supported documentation of endangered languages; code-switching and
phonetic variation in multilingual speech; dialectal diversity and its
treatment in AI systems.
Part IV — Applications
Voice assistants and accessibility tools; AI in education and
healthcare communication; forensic phonetics and voice biometrics in
African legal contexts.
Part V — Ethics, Policy, and Futures
Bias and fairness in speech AI; data sovereignty and language policy;
infrastructure and the political economy of speech-AI research in
Africa; future directions for the field.
8. Editorial Process
Chapters will be solicited through an open call for chapters
distributed to relevant academic networks, conferences, and mailing
lists in linguistics, speech technology, and African studies. All
chapters will undergo double-blind peer review by at least two
reviewers with relevant expertise, coordinated by the editors. The
editors will provide a substantive introductory chapter situating the
volume's themes, and a concluding chapter synthesising key findings
and outlining a research agenda for the field.
9. Timeline
-Call for chapters distributed August 2026
-Abstract submission deadline 15 September 2026
-Full chapter submission deadline 15 December 2026
-Peer review completed 31 January 2027
-Revised chapters submitted 28 February 2027
-Manuscript submitted to publisher April 2027
-Anticipated publication Late 2027
10. Estimated Length and Format
The volume is projected at approximately 18–22 chapters of 6,000–8,000
words each, totalling roughly 120,000–150,000 words, plus editorial
front and back matter. The book is intended for both print and digital
publication, with open-access options to be discussed with the
publisher given the volume's relevance to researchers and institutions
across Africa with variable access to subscription content.
11. About the Editors
Dr. Evans Gesura Mecha is affiliated with Kisii University, with
research interests spanning linguistics and the application of
language technology to African language contexts.
Dr. Samwel Komenda is a phonetics and phonology lecturer at Kisii
University and brings complementary expertise in linguistics and
language studies to the editorial team.
Together, the editors bring a combined interest in phonetics, African
languages, and the emerging possibilities and challenges that
artificial intelligence presents for the field. Full editor
biographies and CVs are available on request.
12. Contact
For further information, or to discuss this proposal, please contact
the editors at
evans-mecha at kisiiuniversity.ac.ke.

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Forensic Linguistics
                     Language Documentation
                     Phonetics
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng, stan1293)




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