The Journal of African Languages and Linguistics has been the principal European outlet for descriptive and theoretical work on the languages of Africa since 1979. Edited for most of its life from the Department of African Linguistics at the University of Leiden, it publishes two numbers a year in English, French and German, and its purple covers carry a now-familiar block of some two hundred language names — Bari, Shilluk, Nandi, Iraqw, Wolof, Yorùbá, Igbo, Hausa, Edo — set in the shape of the continent.
The issues held here span twenty years and three publishers, and the imprint change is visible on the covers: Volume 13 (1992) is still a Foris book; from Volume 14 the journal is published by Mouton de Gruyter in Berlin and New York; by Volume 33 (2012) it has been redesigned as a De Gruyter Mouton title with an online ISSN. The editorship moves with it — from Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, to Felix K. Ameka alone from Volume 17, to Ameka and Maarten Mous through the 1998–2004 run, to Ameka and Azeb Amha by 2012.
Nigerian scholarship runs through the whole set. Kay Williamson of Port Harcourt sits on the editorial board; the articles include Akinbiyi Akinlabi and Eno E. Urua on the Ibibio verb, Walter Bisang and Remi Sonaiya on the Yorùbá high tone syllable, Bruce Connell on Lower Cross, and Thomas L. Cook on focus in Efik, published after his death; the reviews take in Paul Newman’s Hausa grammar, Jonathan Owens on Nigerian Arabic, Nicholas Faraclas on Nigerian Pidgin and Kana, and grammars of Tangale, Yala, Gade and Mupun.
These issues come to the Library through the donation of Professor Ronald P. Schaefer, and are destined for the Department of Linguistics at the University of Ìbàdàn. This is a first batch; further issues will be catalogued as they are scanned.
