The Arusha Working Papers in African Linguistics released its inaugural volume in 2018; however, the genesis of this journal is actually found in the summer of 2017 in Usa River, Tanzania, where a group of educators and students came together at MS Training Centre for Development Cooperation (MS-TCDC) once per week to present and discuss their research on African languages and linguistics.
This group, the Arusha Linguistics Circle, serves as the publisher for AWPAL. In addition to these weekly presentations and discussions, members also met regularly at the nearby Tumaini University Makumira for graduate students’ thesis defenses, which served as the real impetus for the development of our journal. When the current Editor-in-Chief, Troy E. Spier, asked one of the other members of the group, Ahmed Kipacha, what would happen to the students’ theses after their successful defense and graduation, the response was quite sobering: “A copy will be stored in the library.” While it is, by no means, uncommon for a university to store copies of under(graduate) theses in their library, the knowledge contained within becomes unavailable to scholars outside of the immediate area unless digitized.
Because this was not an option, the Arusha Linguistics Circle launched AWPAL as a way of ensuring regular, consistent access to the work of such advanced graduate students and junior scholars. Although the geographic and linguistic scope of the journal has expanded significantly since those early days, our commitment remains the same: To guaranteeing that un(der)heard voices on un(der)documented languages from the African continent find their home in a scholarly outlet.