Submissions

Author Guidelines

1.        Referencing: 

a)      Indicate the exact page number(s) after the publication year in the case of a direct quotation, whether it is indented or not. 

b)     If the quotation is longer than two lines, indent it and type it in a smaller font size. Note that the font type we use in the published version is Trebuchet MS (font size 10 and size 9 for quotations and footnotes), but you can submit your draft in any font type. 

c)      Also indicate the exact page number(s) each time you attribute a specific claim, comment, explanation, or idea to a given author, whether the author is mentioned before or after the claim, comment, etc. It is not enough to simply indicate the author and the publication year.

 

2.        Footnotes: 

If there are any in your paper, leave them at the foot of the page; do not transform them into endnotes.

 

3.        Example bibliographical references: 

References should take the format of the following sample (which, obviously, is not exhaustive): 

Abney, Steven P. 1987. The English Noun Phrase and its Sentential Aspect. PhD

Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Baker, Paul. 2017. American and British English: Divided by A Common Language?

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Collins, Peter. 2023. “Modals and quasi-modals in English World-Wide”.

Journal of English Linguistics, 51(3): 1-29. 

Ellis, Rod and Gary Barkhuizen. 2005. Analysing Learner Language.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gorman, P. Thomas. 1974. “The development of language policy in Kenya with particular

reference to the education system”. In Wilfred W. Whiteley (ed.), Language in Kenya, 397-453. Nairobi: Oxford University Press. 

Hardie, Andrew. 2017. “Exploratory analysis of word frequencies across corpus texts: Towards a

critical contrast of approaches”. Paper presented at the Corpus Linguistics 17 Conference, University of Birmingham, July 2017. 

Inkelas, Sharon. 2008. “The dual theory of reduplication”. Linguistics, 46(2).

Available online: http://www.reference-global.com/doi/pdf/10.1515/LING.2008.013. [Accessed 10 June 2008] 

Ladefoged, Peter. 1996. Elements of Acoustic Phonetics, 2nd edn. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press. 

Mufwene, Salikoko S., John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey and John Baugh (eds). 1998.

African-American English: Structure, History and Use. London: Routledge. 

Schneider, W. Edgar. 2025. World Englishes as Components of a Complex Dynamic System.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Note: 

·        Remember to include, in the final list of References, all the works mentioned in your paper, but not any that were not. If there is evidence that your list of references contains those that do not exist because they were AI-generated, the article will automatically be rejected.

·        You are also advised NOT to quote from the so-called “predatory journals”. They publish articles that have not been reviewed by experts in the field and are thus likely to contain instances of plagiarism and factual inaccuracies.

 

4.        The structure of the article: 

The expected typical structure for the articles to be published in the UoNJLL is the following (with slight adaptations in some cases): 

·        Title of article and, under it, author’s name and institution of affiliation (e.g. University of Nairobi)  Abstract (in one paragraph; not more than 300 words) 

·        Keywords (not more than 10) 

·        Introduction (covering the following, but without giving them subheadings of their own: background to the study, some literature review, statement of the problem, the research questions/objectives/hypotheses)

·        (IF REALLY NECESSARY) Theoretical/Conceptual/Analytical Framework (with its name explicitly mentioned in the heading)

·        Methodology

·        Results Presentation

·        Discussion of the results (where reference will need to be made to the existing literature and theoretical/conceptual/analytical framework) 

·        Conclusion

·        References 

·        Appendices (if any) 

Notes: 

(i)       Given the structure indicated above, we do not expect the submitted article to have the structure of a postgraduate proposal or Chapter 1 of a PhD thesis typically required by some universities, which has separate sections labelled “Background to the Study”, “Statement of the Problem”, “Theoretical Framework”, “Literature Review”, etc. 

(ii)      Number the Introduction as section No. 1 and the Conclusion as the last section. Do not number the References and the Appendices. Number the sub-sections in the following way: 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, etc.