Missionary Linguistics in Colonial Africa / Corpus de travaux linguistiques des missionnaires provides linguistic analyses of continental Africa and Madagascar languages compiled by French Catholic missionaries between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The corpus contains multilingual (and multi-directional) dictionaries, descriptive grammars, vocabularies, and various hybridizations of these genres. In addition to the catalog of titles, the corpus can be explored, filtered, and searched along several parameters, including the target language documented, author(s), missionary organization(s), and place of publication. An interactive period map allows the texts to be explored geographically by place of publication and target language locus.

This project was a collaboration between Doyle Calhoun (Boston College, Class of 2016), the Digital Scholarship Team, and Professor Margaret Thomas from BC’s Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literatures.