Historical African Languages Database (HALD)

The Creators of HALD

Daren Ray is an Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University where he specializes in the history of Africa. He received a Ph.D. in African History at the University of Virginia (2014) and has previously worked at the American University in Cairo, Connecticut College, and Auburn University.

Jim Law is an Assistant Professor of French at Brigham Young University where he specializes in lexical semantic change and cognitive linguistics. He received a Ph.D. in French Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin (2020).

Earl Kjar Brown is a Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University where he specializes in corpus linguistics and computational linguistics. He received a Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of New Mexico (2008), and has previously worked at Kansas State University, California State University-Monterey Bay, and Auburn University.

Roger Harrison, Ben Carson, Emma Law, and Nils Young have provided immeasurable support as Research Assistants collecting the language resources and checking the entries. Our student programmers Alek Spackman, Katelyn Shellman, and Aaron Shaw have contributed crucial work on document processing and other software needs.

Many thanks to Ben Rencher, Jeremy Browne, and Kathie Gossett in the Office of Digital Humanities at Brigham Young University for their unfailing support and for the server space for this website and the backend database. Much thanks are expressed to Emma Brown for her additional help during several consultations about the database and website interface.

Thanks to Troy Spier at Florida A&M University for his time and expertise during several consultations.