Summary
Tesfaye Negash Bayou, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of linguistics at Kotebe University of Education in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with over three decades of experience in language documentation, linguistics and English language teaching and teacher training. He holds a Ph.D. in Documentary Linguistics and Culture from Addis Ababa University.
Tesfaye Negash is an accomplished documentary linguist, having completed an Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) grant from SOAS, University of London, for the "Documentation and Grammatical Description of Komo" (Project IGS0194). He created an extensive audio-visual corpus of the Komo language (ISO 639-3: xom), a Nilo-Saharan language spoken on the Ethiopia-Sudan border. This collection is permanently archived at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR). The project aimed to document endangered oral genres like folktales and riddles to help the Komo community re-energize and maintain the use of their linguistic resources for the socialization of children and for linguistic research.
He was an invited participant and presenter at the prestigious 3L International Summer School on Language Documentation and Revitalization in 2012, organized by the Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage (CNRS/University of Lyon). During this event, he presented his research on the "Documentation and Grammatical Description of Komo," engaging with international experts on critical issues of language transmission, socialisation, and revitalisation.
Beyond his research, Tesfaye is recognized for his pedagogical leadership. He was featured as the British Council's Member of the Month (January 2025) for his role as a Teacher Champion in Africa's English Connects community, where he actively mentors less-experienced teachers. He is a graduate of the NILE Online Trainer Development programme and holds an MBA in addition to his linguistics doctorate.
At CoLang 2026, Negash will draw on his extensive fieldwork and teacher-training background to lead the workshop "From Field to Archive: A Collaborative Workflow for Documenting Endangered Languages," using his ongoing documentation of the endangered Kwegu language of Ethiopia as a practical case study.