Librarian Charles Riley, opening access to indigenous African Languages

Charles Riley began his career at Yale Library more than 20 years ago as a work-study student in the African Collection. Soon afterward, he joined the history and social sciences team as a catalog assistant. Today, he is the catalog librarian for African Languages. He also works on making collection materials in lesser-known indigenous African languages available to researchers.

 

As a member of the Monographic Latin Script and Receiving and Cataloging Team in the Technical Services Department, Charles works with books, primarily from Africa, written in African languages. As a catalog librarian, he supplements bibliographic metadata to create a complete record for each book, including call numbers, subject headings, and descriptive information. 

 

In 2010, Charles became the first cataloger in the United States to add Ethiopic script to a bibliographic record—information he also shared with Emory University, which has an active country office in Ethiopia. 

 

Charles has since then translated several other obscure scripts through romanization tables and the Unicode Standard—systems that convert non-Latin or vernacular scripts into the Latin alphabet. These conversions have allowed collection materials in non-Roman scripts to enter the library’s online cataloging system, allowing scholars full access to valuable resources. 

 

Charles’s interest in preserving language began while a graduate student in African Studies at Yale. He learned of an obscure language called Vai—a Niger-Congo language spoken by the Mandé people in Liberia and Sierra Leone. He and a classmate invited members of the Liberian community to meet to document the Vai language and script in order to enter it into the Unicode Standard, making it available to them for use in emails and word processing. Charles later did similar work with the Bamum script of Cameroon and the Bassa Vah script of Liberia, in collaboration with Michael Everson, one of the co-authors of the Unicode Standard. The National Endowment for the Humanities supported these projects through the Script Encoding Initiative at University of California, Berkeley.

 

Charles is now working with members of the New Haven community who speak the Loma language and dialects. Loma is an indigenous language of the Mandé people of Liberia, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire. Charles learned of New Haven’s Loma community through conversations with taxi drivers who were members. 

 

“I had been to Guinea in 2009 and started some initial research on the Loma language. I knew they had a unique script of their own, and I knew it wasn’t widespread or widely used,” he said, “but I did want to get in contact with speakers of the language who could help me learn the mechanics of how the language works and understand it better.” 

 

Charles continues learning through ongoing community meetings and gatherings. “I want to immerse myself in the culture. It helps to understand both the language and the culture if you have contact with the community as a whole. It’s not that I’m fluent in Loma, but I would be much more at a loss of how to understand the importance of the language to the culture if it weren’t for the community engagement.”

 

Omobolaji Olarinmoye, librarian for African Studies, and members of Digital Special Collections and Access (DSCA) and Preservation Digital Strategies (PDS) are essential collaborators in Charles’s work preserving languages. “Omobolaji has been very helpful in guiding a project called the Leitner Project, working on enhancing metadata for Nigerian resources. Colleagues at PDS have digitized a microfilm of 132 texts in Loma and DSCA staff made this available online”

 

The digitized microfilm is open access, restoring the Liberian Loma community’s access to material destroyed when their archives were burned down during the first Liberian Civil War (1989–1997). 

 

“We are still hopeful about getting the Loma script into the Unicode Standard, but it is going to take a lot of continued community engagement to make that work,” Charles said.

 

Charles and colleagues are making progress with several additional languages, however. They have made available online handwritten notes and manuscripts in the Garay script, invented in 1961 by El Hadj Assane Faye—former president of the Movement of African Language Teachers in Senegal—for the Wolof language of Senegal. 

 

Charles is also working on encoding two additional scripts: Bété, spoken in southwest Côte d’Ivoire, and Kpelle, spoken by the Kpelle people of Liberia and Guinea. He and Abraham Keita ’24, who was born in Liberia, are in the early stages of developing a process to translate and transcribe audio recordings, made in the 1970s in the Kpelle language, that contain information about the history and use of Kpelle script. 

 

—Deborah Cannarella