Winneba (C/R), July 18, GNA- A ten-day school on documentary linguistics for 30 participants from English and French speaking West African countries, was opened at the University of Education, Winneba (UEW) on Thursday. The participants are from Cote D'Ivoire, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Gambia, Liberia, Senegal, Togo, Chad, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Niger. The event is a prelude to the 26th West African Languages Conference that would be organised under the theme "Languages Documentary in Supports of West Africa Languages", at the University on July 27 2008 for the participants. The school is aimed at equipping participants with knowledge and skills that would assist them to document local languages of the various participating countries towards the development of the West-African sub-region. Topics to be discussed at the school include ethnography in language documentation, meaning and translation in documentation, audio-recording techniques, phonetics data and analysis, sociolinguistic survey, grant application writing, general issues and contextualized linguistic practices.

Opening the school, Professor Felix K. Ameka, a Ghanaian Lecture at the Linden University in the Netherlands, urged the participants to take the school seriously so that they could come out with meaningful ideas to enable them to document local languages of the various countries. He expressed the hoped that at the end of the school, participants would be able to impact the knowledge and skills acquired to other experts in linguistics. Prof. Ameka, who is also leader of ten-member facilitators of the school, commended government for introducing the New Education Reform and suggested that Ghanaian languages should be used as medium of teaching in basic schools in the country. Mr. Nsoh Avea, a senior lecture of UEW, and local chairman of West Africa Linguistics Society, urged participants to take the programme seriously to enable them to acquire enough knowledge to enhance their work.