Samuel Gyasi Obeng

Samuel Gyasi Obeng is a Ghanaian-American linguist. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and the Director of the West African Languages Institute (WALI) at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB). He is affiliated with IUB’s Linguistics Department, African Studies Program (Hamilton-Lugar School of Global and International Studies) and holds Adjunct Professorship positions in the Departments of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Islamic Studies

Obeng has written extensively (35 books and 135 refereed articles) about language and liberty, African communicational mores, especially, verbal indirection, political, juridical, religious, health and informal discourses, African onomasiology and African languages documentation.

Obeng has appeared on radio (Public Radio International, WFHB, Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, etc.), television (GTV, etc.) and in print media to present some of his work and provide expert opinion on social and political issues in Africa. He has been a keynote speaker at important conferences, won important awards and served as external evaluator for universities in Africa, Oceania, Asia, Europe, the Americas and the Greater Middle East. Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow 2015 & 2016 2018 - Conflict Resolution in Africa: Language, Law and Politeness in Ghanaian (Akan) Jurisprudence A. Durham (NC): Carolina Academic Press. Language and Liberty in Ghanaian Political Communication: A Critical Discourse Perspective Ghana Journal of Linguistics, 7(2): 199-224. with Lotven, Samson - Nasality in Gengbe Syllables. African Linguistics in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Paul Newman. 2019, with Lotven, Samson; Botne, Robert; Bongiovanni, Silvina & Weirich, Phillip - African Linguistics across the Disciplines: Proceedings of the 48th Conference of the Association of Contemporary African Linguistics. Language Science Press. Berlin: Germany. with Debrah, Emmanuel - AGhanaian Politics and Political CommunicationA. London & New York: Rowman and Littlefield International. 2020 - Grammatical Pragmatics: Language, Power and Liberty in African (Ghanaian) Political Discourse. Discourse and Society, 31(1): 85-105. A Nation in Crises. Conneaut Lake, PA: Page Publishing. 2021, with Obeng, Cecilia - Invisible Faces; Hidden Stories: Narratives of Vulnerable Populations and Their Caregivers. Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books. 2022 - Language and Liberty. Legon Journal of Humanities 33(1): 138-159. with Kofi Agyekum - Topics in West African Discourse Pragmatics. Cologne-Germany: Rüdiger Koeppe Verlag. Discursive strategies for managing bad news: Exemplification from Akan (Ghana). In Galen Sibanda, Deo Ngonyani, Jonathan Choti & Ann Biersteker (eds.), Descriptive and theoretical approaches to African linguistics: Selected papers from the 49th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, 295-323. Berlin: Language Science Press. 2023, with Kwesi Brown - English-Efutu Dictionary with Phonetic Transcription and Cultural Mores. Cologne-Germany: Rüdiger Koeppe Verlag. with Ofori, Seth Antwi - Language, Power and Liberty: Discursive Constructions of Ghanaian Glossolalic Speeches. Discourse and Society.