The life-blood of our work is the information that only our consultants have access to, namely, their native speaker intuitions and the training they have to make those intuitions most efficiently available to us. For example, our consultants must often use their linguistic training to make sense of a poorly asked question by an ignorant analyst and return information that is useful to our common purpose: the exploration, and in the best case, explanation, of empirical patterns in natural language. Thus it is a collaborative enterprise, and some documents are likely to result, particularly the anaphora sketch, that will be the result of that collaboration.

To become a consultant to the Afranaph project, you have to be a native speaker of a non-Colonial language of Africa and a trained linguist. Participation in our project is voluntary and non-contractual. We do pay our consultants for various levels of participation, but the reality of the situation is that we cannot pay what the work is worth. Besides the general benefit your participation will bring to the linguistic research community, we like to think we are providing our consultants with an opportunity that brings their efforts for the project, their language, and other work they have done, to the attention of a wider world community of linguists interested in a broad range of theoretical and (to a lesser extent) practical questions. If you are a young scholar and you  want to enter the world community of Africanist linguists, theoretical linguists and typologists, or both, it is not unrealistic to view your participation in our project as making a contribution that will be unique and significant. If you are already part of that community, then you know what your potential contribution is worth and we hope you will take this opportunity to share it with us. Although it is possible and anticipated that some linguists may choose not to reveal their identities in order to participate in the project, we find that most of our consultants do wish to be known, and some of these consultants may be asked to contribute to some of the other aspects of our files, including the grammar sketch, the anaphora sketch, the translated tale (with morpheme breakdowns and glosses) the bibliography and so forth.