Brief update, March 2026
Dear Circle members,
A few updates that hopefully will be of interest to some of you…
Webinar series: Conversations on Language Policy in Africa. The last webinar in this series will take place on Friday, 10 April at 4 pm CEST/SAST (that is 9 am in Chicago, 3 pm in Lagos, 5 pm in Nairobi). It will be delivered by none other than Salikoko Mufwene. The telltale title of his talk is: “Multilingualism is not a barrier to African economic development; bad economic policies are.” Register via the Initiative Afrique site of the University of Bern (Switzerland) or directly here. Follow this link for recordings of past webinars.
African Languages Conference, Accra and online, 23-28 February
Our Circle had an online panel discussion on Thursday, 26 January on the topic of Multilingual learning for All: challenges and limitations. Panellists included Djouroukoro Diallo, Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju, Addisalem Yallew and undersigned. If you missed it and if you are interested: find the recording here – ‘our’ part starts at 4 hours 49 minutes – you may find the rest of the recording interesting as well.
Call for Chapters: Circle members Michael Kretzer and Russell Kaschula have started to work on Volume III of their ambitious Handbook of Language Policies in Africa. This volume will focus on Countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) (including former members Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger). They are looking for chapter authors! Provisional deadline for abstracts is the 30th of April.
Call for Papers: on 25 and 26 May, the University of the Free State, South Africa, will host the Fifth International Translanguaging Symposium in the Global South.
Nine new members this month: Dr Laela Adamson, University of Strathclyde, UK; Mohamed Ag Alhassane, Freelance professional translator-interpreter-post-editor, Mali; Dr Andargachew Getu, University of Gondar, Ethiopia; Dr Jakob Lesage, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany; Dr Anémone Loko Bille, Protestant University of Central Africa, Cameroon; Matlala Rivonia Makwala, Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa; Margot Mol, Language and evaluation consultant, Netherlands; Dr Adeongusha Tsar, National Open University, Nigeria; and Jordan Williams, Texas State University, USA. Dr Tsar has just published a Tiv-English dictionary, available here.
As always, if you have things or hear of things that you think might be of interest to Circle members, don’t hesitate to send a short message, either via the mail or via WhatsApp - we will be happy to share the information. Our ‘Afrilang’ WhatsApp group currently has 75 members. If you are interested in joining, drop me a line!
Looking forward to seeing or corresponding with some of you during our upcoming activities, best regards,
Bert (also on behalf of Comfort, Sarita and Taiwo).