Submission and Style Guidelines

Submit papers via e-mail to any one of the General Editors.

Copyright

Authors retain copyright to their work. By agreeing to publish in the Northwest Journal of Linguistics, authors:

• affirm that the submitted material is original and that they have the right to publish it;
• affirm that language data was obtained in an ethical manner and is used with appropriate permissions;
• grant the Journal the non-exclusive right to publish the paper on the web in perpetuity;
• grant the Journal the exclusive right to publish the paper on the web for a period of one year.

Format

Articles should be submitted in electronic form, normally by email, preferably in Portable Document Format (PDF) or in Open Document Format. If you are unable to generate either format, as a last resort you may submit a file in a Microsoft Word format, so long as there are no special symbols or the necessary fonts are embedded.

Artwork, audio, and video files

We encourage the use of illustrations (such as maps or diagrams), photographs, and audio and video files. Please send in electronic format. Audio files should be provided in one of the common, non-proprietary file formats, such as WAV. The audio content should if at all possible be uncompressed (linear PCM data) or compressed using a lossless method such as FLAC.

Article length

The articles should be of a suitable length to make the points put forth. Naturally, articles should not be longer than necessary, but since paperless publication avoids the constraints imposed by the print medium, longer submissions containing copious data are quite acceptable.

Language

Papers may be in English, French, or any of the native languages of the Northwest. Papers in languages other than English or French should be accompanied by an English or French translation. We will also consider papers in native languages in the form of an audio or video recording only, accompanied by a written translation into English or French.

Review process

All papers published other than those invited by the editors, including those submitted by an editor or member of the editorial board, are reviewed by at least two referees. The editors may reject papers on their own authority, without sending them out to referees, if they are clearly unsuitable for publication in this journal. In the event of submission by an editor, the editorial process will be handled by another editor.

Authors are invited to suggest appropriate referees. Please provide an email address if possible.

Abstracts and Keywords

Each submission should include a brief abstract, about 100 - 150 words in length, which summarizes the main focus of the article.

Authors should include four to six keywords beneath the abstract. These keywords will be used to index the articles on the NWJL website, as well as online in academic indices and search engines.

Style guidelines

To help speed production, we encourage authors to submit papers without concern for details of style and presentation as these can be taken care of later. Do format in such a way as to facilitate review. Double-spacing and the use of wide margins facilitates annotation by referees, as does the use of footnotes rather than endnotes, and the presentation of figures and images in situ.

Papers accepted for publication should be formatted in an internally consistent style of the author's choice. However, we suggest the stylistic practices outlined in our Stylesheet and may require authors to revise according to them.

For more detailed guidelines on manuscript preparation, download the NWJL Stylesheet [PDF file - 168 Kb]. For guidelines on interlinear glossing, see How to format interlinearized linguistic examples [PDF file - 368 Kb].