Teaching and Learning Guide for: Africa’s Linguistic Diversity

Abstract

Author’s Introduction African languages have played an important role in the development of linguistic theory but their role in the fields of historical linguistics and linguistic typology has been less prominent. Africa’s linguistic diversity has been long underestimated given the dominance of the four-family model proposed by Joseph Greenberg. Criticism of this model has long held among specialists in some of Africa’s smaller and lesser-known language families, but has only recently become more widely acknowledged among linguists. Archaeologists, geneticists, and others continue to model African prehistory based on African linguistic classifications, which are outdated and which have failed to withstand scrutiny. This teaching and learning guide suggests a program to train scholars in recognizing and evaluating the standards by which various African language classifications have been made. Africa’s linguistic diversity will be shown to be far greater than what is suggested by the four-family model. Author Recommends 1. Childs, G. Tucker. 2003. The classification of African languages. An Introduction to African Languages, 19–53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.A highly readable introduction to the subject, ‘The classification of African languages’ provides an overview of the four-phylum model, along with the discussion of some of the major critiques that have been made of it.2. Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. and F.K. Erhard Voeltz. 2007. Africa. Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages, 579–634. ed. by Christopher Moseley. London: Routledge.‘Africa’ provides an overview of the major changes to the picture of African language classification that have been accepted by leading historical linguists and specialists. This reading also includes a list of endangered African languages, and an up-to-date discussion of Africa’s linguistic areas.3. Campbell, Lyle and William J. Poser. 2008. Africa. Language Classification: History and Method, 203–245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.The ‘Africa’ section of Campbell and Poser’s book surveys the history of African language classification. Examples are given showing problems with the types of evidence used to uphold Greenberg and pre-Greenberg classifications.4. Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. 2008. Language ecology and linguistic diversity on the African continent. Language and Linguistics Compass 2(5).840–858. DOI: DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00085.xThe article ‘Language ecology and linguistic diversity on the African continent’ discusses recent revisions to African linguistic classification and pays special attention to the development of spread zones and accretion zones on the continent. It also details several cases of contact-induced linguistic changes.5. Batibo, Herman M. 2005. The endangered languages of Africa. Language Decline and Death in Africa: Causes, Consequences and Challenges, 62–86. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.The book ‘Language Decline and Death in Africa’ is an important survey of the factors that have been leading to a loss of linguistic diversity on the African continent. Chapter 5 ‘The endangered languages of Africa’ provides a concise summary of these factors, as well as a country-by-country outline of endangered languages.6. Mous, Maarten. 2003. Loss of linguistic diversity in Africa. Language Death and Language Maintenance: Theoretical, Practical and Descriptive Approaches, 157–170. ed. by Mark Janse and Sijmen Tol. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.The article ‘Loss of linguistic diversity in Africa’ surveys the linguistic genetic diversity of the continent’s languages and provides an overview of the factors that have led to a language shift in Africa. Online Materials 1. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS)http://wals.info/indexThe World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS) is a database of over 58,000 datapoints of phonological, grammatical, and lexical features of a subset of the world’s languages. The database allows scholars see maps of the distribution of these features, and to read the 142 chapters examining these structural features across the typological database.The Online database is a project of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Max Planck Digital Library, edited by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie (Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, 2008). WALS was also published as a book (with CD-ROM) by Oxford University Press in 2005.2. SIL Electronic Survey Reportshttp://www.sil.org/silesr/indexes/languages.aspThe SIL Electronic Survey Reports website provides links to a large number of language surveys (in a downloadable pdf format) produced by Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) researchers. These reports include a great deal of linguistic information about a large number of African languages. Of particular interest to the comparative linguist is the large number of word lists included in the reports.3. Jouni Maho’s Web Resources for African Languageshttp://www.africanlanguages.org/Jouni Maho’s ‘Web Resources for African Languages’ pages provide a continuously updated list of online databases and downloadable documents on African languages. Links to both published and unpublished sources are included. The pages also provide a select print bibliography for each language family or isolate.4. Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary (CBOLD)http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/CBOLD/The Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary (CBOLD) at the University of California Berkeley as started in 1994 by Larry Hyman and John Lowe but includes contributions from scholars from many other institutions. It includes over 20 searchable Bantu language dictionaries, the Tervuren database of Bantu Lexical Reconstructions (BLR2) (with 9800 entries), and the Tanzanian Language Survey lexical database.5. Ethnologue: Languages of the Worldhttp://www.ethnologue.com/Ethnologue is an ‘encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,912 known living languages’ produced by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). This website provides a quick and handy means of getting information about such topics as: the languages spoken in each country, the number of speakers of each language, language and dialect names (and variants), and relationships between languages. This database (currently in its 15th edition) must be used with some discretion as (i) the number of distinct languages is inflated, and (ii) a Greenbergian four-family referential classification scheme of African languages is treated as a phylogenetic classification.6. UNESCO Redbook of Endangered Languageshttp://www.tooyoo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/archive/RedBook/index.htmlThe UNESCO Redbook of Endangered Languages has a searchable database of the world’s most endangered languages. Information provided includes: language name (and variants), geographical location, relationships, and present state of the language. If known, information is presented about the total number of speakers (and number of members of the ethnic group), degree of speakers’ competenece, mean age of youngest speakers, distribution by sex of speakers, published and unpublished material on the language, and names of competent scholars who work on the language. The data on African languages were provided by Bernd Heine and Matthias Brenzinger. Syllabus: African Languages and Language Comparison This course provides an introduction to African languages and language comparison. The course as outlined is designed as a graduate seminar, but it could also be given as an undergraduate lecture class, with certain modifications. Guests could be brought in to demonstrate linguistic features of different African languages and to teach students some words and phrases. The course could be adapted for students with little or no background in historical linguistics by expanding the section on the Comparative Method, and by including a larger number of in-class and take-home exercises. The course could be modified for a student population of archaeologists and historians by adding a section on the use of linguistics in reconstructing prehistory and reducing the time spent on language endangerment and areal linguistics.Week 1: African language classificationsThe focus of the first week is to familiarize students with Africa, its nations, geography, and languages. Readings are designed to orient students by providing (i) a survey of the state of African language classification (Sands 2009), (ii) an overview of the methods commonly used to classify African languages (Nurse 1997), and (iii) insight into the intellectual history of language classifications (Irvine 1995).Suggested reading:Irvine, Judith. 1995. The family romance of colonial linguistics: Gender and family in nineteenth-century representations of African languages. (Special Issue: Constructing Languages and Publics. ed. by S. Gal and K. Woolard). Pragmatics 5(2).139–153.Nurse, Derek. 1997. The contributions of linguistics to the study of history in Africa. Journal of African history 38(3).358–391. http://www.jstor.org/stable/182541Sands, Bonny. 2009. Africa’s linguistic diversity. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(2).559–580. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00124.xWeek 2: The Comparative MethodThe second week focuses on the tried-and-true standard of language classification, the Comparative Method. If students do not already have a background in historical linguistics, readings, and exercises from general introductions to the subject should be provided. The Comparative Method should be demonstrated in class using data the instructor is familiar with, or with data in Mutaka and Tamanji (2000). The instructor should lead students in a discussion pointing out cases of language families that are and are not based on a classical application of the Comparative Method, based on a reading of Campbell and Poser (2008).Suggested reading:Campbell, Lyle and William J. Poser. 2008. Africa. Language Classification: History and Method, 203–245. Cambridge: Ca