The ALRC aims to aid in the creation and pulblication of resources for the study of African languages; dictionaries, grammars, and texts. The ALRC will raise funds, provide facilities and support, and organize publication.

The ALRC is supported jointly by the African Studies Center and the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania.

The ALRC will bring African language scholars to Penn to produce lexical databases, text corpora, and grammars. The ALRC will develop software which will be useful to scholars, students, and business people both inside and outside of Africa. The ALRC will have an advisory board made up of leading scholars of African languages from universities around the world who will serve to evaluate prospective ALRC projects.

Sandra Barnes (Penn, director of the African Studies Center)

Mark Liberman (Penn, Director of the Linguistic Data Consortium)

Yiwola Awoyale (University of Ilorin and the LDC)

Akin Akinlabi (Rutgers University)

Alwiya Omar (Penn, ASC Language Coordinator)

Moussa Bamba (Penn, LDC)

Currently the ALRC is developing a modern Yoruba dictionary, with approximately 100K entries as well as a Manding dictionary of four languages, including Bambara.

We are also putting together a compilation of the orthographies of African languages so that we can establish a Unicode compatible character set for African Languages. We would appreciate any suggestions of additions to our already existing list of necessary characters.

We are currently focusing on West African language dictionaries and are considering the following languges: Fongbe, Akan, Nupe, Wolof, Edo, Urhobo, Igbo, Ibibio, Defaka, Izon/Ijaw, Fula, Hausa, Ewe, Susu, Emai, Mafa, Esan, Duala, Yabassi, Denya, Echie, Mende, Fon-Gbe, and Temne.