Paul Newman Papers

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Distinguished Professor Emeritus Paul Newman


Paul Newman, distinguished professor emeritus at Indiana University, is a well-known and highly-regarded Africanist linguist. His experience in Africa began in 1961 when he went to Nigeria as a member of the newly established Peace Corps. While serving as a secondary school teacher in Maiduguri in the far northeast of the country, he undertook research on previously undescribed languages belonging to the Chadic family, a group of some 150 or so distinct languages that has remained the focus of his scholarship throughout his academic career. His research output encompasses descriptions of individual Chadic languages, most notably Tera and Kanakuru, comparative/historical studies of the Chadic family as a whole, and detailed analyses of the structure, lexicography, and history of Hausa, the largest and most widely spoken language of West Africa, of which he is recognized as the world’s foremost authority. (See especially his The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar (Yale University Press, 2000) and A History of the Hausa Language: Reconstruction and Pathways to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2022).)

This collection consists of articles, chapters in books, and book reviews published over a fifty+ year period from 1964 to the present. In addition to papers on Chadic and Hausa, the collection also includes studies of general linguistic interest including tone, syllable weight, ideophones, pluractionality, fieldwork methodology, linguistic classification, internal reconstruction, and forensic linguistics. A full list of his publications, which includes some twenty-two books, is provided in one of this collection’s records, "Paul Newman — Publications."

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