Bio
Fiona McLaughlin is a professor of linguistics and African Languages at the University of Florida, where she is also a member of the interdisciplinary Sahel Research Group. A former director of the West Africa Research Center in Dakar, she has taught at the Université Gaston Berger in Saint-Louis, Senegal, and at the Université Abdou Moumouni in Niamey, Niger.  Her current research project, Trans-Saharan Literacies: Writing across the Desert, takes as its subject everyday writing in African languages from the Sahel to the Maghreb. Focusing on vernacular literacy in three scripts, she explores the ideas and ideologies people associate with the scripts and orthographies they choose to illuminate social and political contestations. Her previous work focused on the morphophonology of the Atlantic languages, Wolof, Pulaar, and Sereer, and on the sociolinguistics of language contact in urban west Africa, past and present. Her publications include a number of articles on Atlantic consonant mutation that have appeared in venues such as Phonology and  Studies in African Linguistics, and several articles on urban ways of speaking that have appeared in journals such as Language in Society, the Journal of African Cultural Studies, and Discourse, Context and Media, as well as in her edited volume, The Languages of Urban Africa. Work related to her current project on vernacular literacy has been published in the journals Linguistic Landscape and Archival Science.

Abstract
“Fragments and fabulation: Making meaning of the pew inscriptions at First African Baptist Church in Savannah”

Like historians, linguists are often confronted with disjointed sources and linguistic fragments, but also with archival discoveries that help us to build a narrative about language in the past. This talk is about the potential and limitations of such sources and where they can lead us in our fabulation of a linguistic past. Fabulation, as I use it here, is less a made-up story than one that cannot be verified and is as well likely to be true as false; in other words, fabulations are speculative narratives. The source on which I base my arguments is an elusive and suggestive fragment of African and African-American history in the form of eighty or so inscriptions on the side panels of the church pews in the gallery of First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia. The writing on the pews runs the gamut from simple, repetitive patterns to writing that looks quite a lot like the Arabic script but generates no clear meaning either in Arabic or in ajami, the use of the Arabic script to write African languages, a prevalent practice in the Senegambian region of Muslim West Africa, where many of the early Black inhabitants of the south Georgia coast came from. This talk builds on an encounter with that singular archive to explore the potential and the limitations of working with fragmentary linguistic sources, and the value of listening to those who have other fabulations of the same archive.