April 1, 2014 — Fiat Lingua

By day, William S. Annis is a mild-mannered Unix system administrator. By night (and most weekends) he is, by turns, a not very mild-mannered banjo player, a hobbyist language creator, a paid language creator, a reader of science fiction novels and linguistics papers, a terrible gardener, and an ok cook. He is one of the hosts of the Conlangery Podcast. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Abstract

Historically, the creation of IALs has been a European preoccupation. Afrihili is an African zonal IAL created by Ghanaian civil engineer K. A. Kumi Attobrah in the late 1960s. After a brief discussion of Afrihili’s relationship to Pan-Africanism, I move on to a survey description of the language based on the single published description of the language, Ni Afrihili Oluga. I identify the source languages for vocabulary and particular constructions where I have been able to locate them.

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