Journal of African Languages and Linguistics

Edited by: Felix K. Ameka , Nancy Kula , Sara Petrollino and Jenneke Wal

Language: English

First published: January 1, 1979

Publication Frequency: 2 issues per year

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Starting 2025, Journal of African Languages and Linguistics will be transferred to Gold Open Access on a year-by-year basis. All articles will thus immediately appear under the Creative Commons license CC-BY. There will be no publication costs for the authors. The Open Access transformation is based on Subscribe-to-Open, an alternative model that enables the full Open Access transformation of journals through the continuation of existing subscriptions. The prerequisite for successful transformation is that subscriptions are continued to the same extent as before. The editors of　Journal of African Language and Linguistics and the publisher De Gruyter would therefore like to thank all subscribers for their support, which has made the transformation to Open Access possible.　

Objective

The Journal of African Languages and Linguistics was founded in 1979 and has established itself as an important refereed forum for publications in African linguistics. The Journal of African Languages and Linguistics welcomes original contributions on all aspects of African language studies, synchronic as well as diachronic, theoretical as well as data-oriented. The journal further contains a list of recently published books on African languages and linguistics, which many libraries find to be of use for the acquisition of books. The Journal of African Languages and Linguistics is a peer-reviewed journal of international scope.

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Any topic within African languages and linguistics studies

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Research articles, Book reviews

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High-impact forum in African linguistics
Original contributions on all aspects of African language studies
Theoretical and data-driven approach
High quality peer-review

Open Access
‘The leopard has given birth’: weather terms in Gisamjanga-Datooga

August 21, 2025

Amani Lusekelo, Roland Kießling, Stefan Bruckhaus

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Meteorological events (ME) pose a notorious challenge to linguistic encoding due to a basic tension between their semantics and syntactic structure which, in most languages, requires a predicate and at least one participant. Since MEs typically do not involve any canonical participants, there is considerable leeway for languages to either construe participants or to find ways to do without them. This contribution seeks to describe the strategies for the expression of weather concepts in the Gisamjanga variety of Datooga, a Southern Nilotic language of Tanzania, and integrate them into the comparative typological framework of Eriksen et al. 2010. Linguistics of weather: Cross-linguistic patterns of meteorological expressions. Studies in Language 34(3). 565–601 and Eriksen et al. 2012. Weather and language. Language and Linguistics Compass 6(6). 383–402. In doing so, we argue that a typological model which claims to represent the full gamut of ME encoding strategies in human languages must incorporate two additional factors: (a) the domain-internal variation of ME encoding strategies encountered within one language, (b) metaphorical ME expressions which cannot be classified as argument- or predicate-framed since neither predicate nor argument directly refer to any weather event. In sum, both of these factors point to the necessity to extend the typological model of ME expression by the parameter of pragmatical markedness, as exemplified in our concluding section.
Open Access
Morphology of intransitive verbs in the Agar dialect of Dinka

November 3, 2025

Torben Andersen

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This article describes the morphology of intransitive verbs in the Agar dialect of Dinka, a Western Nilotic language which exhibits an extreme degree of non-concatenative morphology. Intransitive verbs comprise three groups: verbs that are clearly simple, i.e. underived, verbs that are clearly derived, and verbs whose derivational status seems indeterminable synchronically. The basic form of an intransitive verb (and other verbs), whether simple or derived, is an inflectionally unmarked monosyllable. Derivation does not involve affixation but is expressed by phonological alternations in the root, involving vowel length, vowel quality, voice quality of the vowel and/or tone. Derivational categories of intransitive verbs with an intransitive base include centrifugal, centripetal and plural. Derivational categories of intransitive verbs with a transitive base include antipassive, reciprocal, antipassive centrifugal, antipassive centripetal, antipassive iterative, and middle, the latter having meanings which include anticausative and reflexive. Inflection of intransitive verbs is also to a large extent non-concatenative, with the same types of alternation in the root as in derivational processes. Both derivation and inflection are to a large extent predictable.

Journal Impact Factor	0.6	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
5-year Journal Impact Factor	0.7	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
Journal Citation Indicator	0.17	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
CiteScore	0.5	2024, Scopus (Elsevier B.V., 2025)
SCImago Journal Rank	0.13	2024, SJR (Scimago Lab, 2025; Data Source: Scopus)
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	0.282	2024, CWTS Journal Indicators (CWTS B.V., 2025; Data Source: Scopus)
European Reference Index for the Humanities	0

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics

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