Author Submissions

Guide for Mother Tongue Authors

 ASLIP was founded in 1986 to encourage international interdisciplinary information-sharing, discussion, and debate among biogeneticists, paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, and historical linguists on questions relating to the emerging synthesis on language origins and ancestral human spoken languages. According to the founder of ASLIP, Harold C. Fleming,

“The goal of our enterprise is to seek the truth as it pertains to the emerging synthesis about modern human origins. ASLIP and its journal, Mother Tongue, are not committed to any single proposition.”

In that spirit, we encourage authors to submit articles to Mother Tongue in any of the fields mentioned above (or any related fields), especially as they relate at any level to linguistic taxa (macrolinguistic – language families – subfamilies). However, we do not encourage the collection or comparison of purely typological resemblances or random “look-alikes” not rooted in serious historical linguistic research. Nor do we encourage any kind of nationalistic or ethnocentric theories (e.g., “all languages come from Turkish,” or the like). We expect the data to be accurate and documented.

On the other hand, we will not suppress original ideas, hypotheses and theories, as long as they are presented in serious scientific terms. A major reason that Professor Fleming founded Mother Tongue was to give voice to innovative paradigms and bold hypotheses that were being (and still are being) rejected – “blocked” in his terms – by standard journals.

Please submit your article by email to Gregory Haynes (haynes@sonic.net) in the form of a Word® document (or compatible program) in the Times New Roman font. Your article will be subjected to peer review prior to acceptance and publication.


Stele of Minnakht, chief of the scribes. during the reign of Ay (c. 1321 BC). Louvre Museum, Salle 26, Antiquités égyptiennes. (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license)