Abstract
A linguistic overview of the languages of Africa, beginning with a survey of the basic reference works. Some phonological characteristics widely found throughout the continent, especially those most relevant to orthography, are described. The traditional four phyla of African languages are then taken up one by one, noting recent disagreements about their classification and subgrouping.
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Notes
- 1.
The precise number of African languages is not known (partly owing to the problem of distinguishing languages from dialects), with estimates varying widely; “a language” and “a dialect” in this sense are not linguistic concepts, but political. Ethnologue’s figures are considered by many to be an overestimate (see, e.g., Campbell & Grondona, 2008, 637–38; Hammarström, 2015, 732–33). Greenberg (1963) could list only 730, because of the dearth of information available; the current estimate is usually around 1500. Whatever the true figure, it is clear that the African continent is characterized by tremendous linguistic diversity, and this state of affairs poses enormous challenges for literacy acquisition – an omnipresent theme throughout this volume.
Because the readership of this volume is presumed to comprise largely non-linguists, various linguistic concepts are explained as they arise.
- 2.
“Competing” orthographies based on French, English, or Portuguese spelling ensued.
- 3.
Missionaries and administrators alike who introduced Roman-alphabet writing systems for indigenous languages of Africa were influenced by their own orthographies – English, French, occasionally German – and there were recurrent attempts to standardize and unify the representations, at least within the scope of each power’s realm, of “exotic” sounds that taxed the mere 21 consonant and 5 vowel letters available. Tucker, 1971 details forty years of experiments, spanning half the colonial period through the beginnings of independence across the continent, in many of which he himself had been involved.
- 4.
Liberia was settled from the United States, and its administrative language is English.
- 5.
What appears to be a complete recasting of the classification of the languages of Africa has been presented in Güldemann, 2018. but cf. n. 30.
- 6.
In 1949–50 Greenberg in seven “Studies in African Linguistic Classification” with afterthoughts in 1954 (collected in Greenberg, 1955) gathered and systematized the information that was available by then (far surpassing what had been available to Schmidt a quarter-century earlier [1926, 79–116; based, per Greenberg, 1948, 28, on Drexel, 1921–1925]), proposing 16 separate language families, most of them small.
- 7.
This was a far cry from standard historical linguistics, which operates by finding regular correspondences between the sounds of putatively related languages, working back through time, classifying the most closely related languages together, then comparing the proposed recent-ancestral languages with each other, and so on, eventually reaching something that may resemble what might have been spoken thousands of years ago. The method works because language is constantly changing, and if speech communities do not remain in constant contact, their languages change differently, and the longer languages have been growing apart, the less material they retain in common to be compared.
A simple example may be taken from the Semitic family in the Afroasiatic phylum. Here are three words in the closely related Hebrew and Syriac languages: Heb. šēn, Syr. šennā ‘tooth’; Heb. báyit, Syr. baytā ‘house’; and Heb. šōr, Syr. tawrā ‘ox’. (Each pair stands for dozens of examples of the same correspondences š = š, t = t, and š = t.) Even if we did not know that the corresponding Arabic words are sinnun, baytun, and θawrun, we would assume that the three regular correspondences evidence three different phonemes in the “Proto-Semitic” language that is ancestral to all three known languages. (And θ, which stands for English th as in thin, would be a good guess for a sound that could become, over time, š in one language and t in another.)
- 8.
Racism: the belief that a member of one “race” is ipso facto superior or inferior to a member of another “race.” Racialism: the belief that race is a biological category with influence on behavior and/or culture.
- 9.
It has long been historical-linguistic dogma that one cannot prove that two languages are not related (Bright, 1970). Dimmendaal, 2019 and 2020 each contains a list of language isolates, and the two lists are not identical. Blench, 2018 offers theoretical considerations and one to a few paragraphs on each of 16 languages, the list again not the same as either of Dimmendaal’s.
- 10.
Namely: inflectional morphemes are often short, containing only a single consonant, increasing the risk of chance resemblance; inflectional morphology tends not to draw on a language’s entire phonemic inventory, but on only a few more common phonemes; and inflections are most often suffixes, and sounds at the ends of words have a tendency of being “eroded” by language change, removing the fodder for comparisons.
- 11.
Recognizing that each community is likely to have its own variety of “elevated speech” appropriate to oratory, to annals, and so on. Note that villages A, B, and C probably have distinct names for their language varieties, helping to increase the count of languages (see n. 2).
- 12.
CR07 provides considerable phonetic and historical detail, which is for the most part omitted here.
- 13.
From 1989, the IPA symbol had been [\( \overset{\smile }{v} \)]; earlier, [
] had been used. The symbol [
], presumably for the bilabial allophone (earlier [\( \overset{\smile }{\mathrm{w}} \)]) has been added to Unicode but not to the IPA – properly so, because in no language is it a phoneme distinct from /
/. - 14.
Ideophones (Kilian-Hatz, 2020), first described in 1927 in African languages, named only in 1935, have since been identified in languages around the world. To an extent they fall into the “I know one when I see it” category. For Olson and Hajek, they are words that sound like or suggest what they denote. English examples include onomatopoeias like tinkle and ding-dong and nonsense coinages like bibbety-bobbety-boo; though in some languages they are much more widespread. For Kilian-Hatz, however, they are outside any syntactic or morphological structure, so that tinkle is not an ideophone, but ding-dong is. She also says, however, that for the most part they do not involve “phonetically aberrant” speech sounds.
- 15.
Some writers insist on calling these sounds labial-velars, suggesting that labiovelar be taken as a cover term for labial-velars, labialized velars such as [kʷ], and velarized bilabials such as [pʷ], though a need for such a term is not immediately apparent.
- 16.
Dave Roberts (pers. comm., 7 July 2021) offers examples from two Gur languages of Togo; Moba: /g͡bḛ̀̀ŋ̀/ ‘to be fat’, /bɔ̀gbíg̀/ [bɔ̀gə̀bígə̀] ‘little bag’; Nawdm̰: /g͡bùrá/ ‘hit-perfective’, /fɔ́ǵbá/ [fɔ́ɣə̀bá] woman, wife’. Observe that, phonetically, the consonant cluster /gb/ is broken up by inserting a vowel, leading to the spelling of /gb/ as g̈b with dieresis (compare Eng. naïve, Noël).
- 17.
More usual counts of vowel phonemes are 7, 5, or even, as in Arabic, just 3, /a i u/ (Hockett, 1955).
- 18.
Descriptions of the vowel quality difference had included breathy vs. creaky (Jack Berry) and fuller/deeper vs. choked (Stewart) for tense vs. lax respectively; Stewart uses raised/unraised, from the English analogy, as his general term, even though tongue height barely differs, if at all, within the pairs.
- 19.
More familiar tone languages, such as Chinese, usually have lexical tone only.
- 20.
Greenberg uses the derogatory term “Hottentot” for the Nama [or Khoekhoe] language and “Bushman” for San.
- 21.
Before the IPA symbols were codified, phoneticians had introduced symbols that were more letter-like (ɋ, ʇ, ʗ, ʖ, ψ respectively). It is not clear why they didn’t find general acceptance.
- 22.
The spelling Khoesan used in Vossen, 2013 “is preferred to the traditional ‘Khoisan’ because it is more adequate to the pronunciation of the word” (p. viii) – but the pronunciation of the (made-up) word is nowhere specified.
- 23.
In one analysis, 19 such prefixes have been postulated for the ancestor of the Bantu languages (Schadeberg, 2003, 149). Most have semantic content. Some are paired, marking singular and plural. A simple example comes from Southern Sotho (/sutu/): Lesotho, ‘country of the Sotho’; as a British colony it was called Basutoland, ‘(land of) the Sotho people’ (mosotho ‘a Sotho person’); and the language is called Sesotho.
- 24.
Many of the contributors to Bendor-Samuel 1989, though, recur in the later collections mentioned here.
- 25.
- 26.
That is, a lexicon of formulas from which attested words can be derived by applying “rules” of historical changes specific to each language/group.
- 27.
Detailed map in Dimmendaal, 2008, 850.
- 28.
A typical statement: “The actual comparative evidence for a Niger-Congo affiliation is indeed rather slim, and no convincing evidence has been added over the past decades [since Greenberg, 1963]. Consequently, Mande and Ubangian are best treated as independent language families” (Dimmendaal, 2008, 842).
- 29.
See n. 25.
- 30.
This may not have been intentional. The General Editor’s preface (p. x) notes that there had been fewer disappointments from contributors to this volume than to previous ones, but Schachter (1971, 32) lists three controversial topics two of which he does not need to address because they are dealt with by specialists elsewhere in the volume. One of them is the question of Nilotic or “Nilo-Hamitic” within Nilo-Saharan. Greenberg (1971, 436–37) does mention critics but offers refutations without clearly stating what their objections were.
- 31.
Lexicostatistics assumes that the number of cognates (taken from a list of “basic vocabulary” believed to be resistant to borrowing) shared between pairs of languages is an indication of their degree of relatedness. Bender, 1971 uses 99-word lists from 103 languages to suggest classifications of all four language families of Ethiopia – Semitic, Cushitic, Omotic, and Nilo-Saharan. Lexicostatistics fell into rather bad odor when it began to be used to estimate the “time depth” of the language families arrived at, glottochronology, by assuming that the fewer cognates a pair of languages shared, the longer ago they had diverged. Difficulties include the unproven assumption that languages retain or change their vocabulary at a constant rate, and the fact that there are few languages in the world for which calibration from comparing early written records is available.
- 32.
Bryan does not suggest any larger groupings of the languages she discusses, but she excludes those known to be “Hamitic” (i.e. Afroasiatic [Cushitic]), Nilotic, and “Nilo-Hamitic” (a category rooted in racial linguistics that Greenberg did away with).
- 33.
Cf. Dimmendaal, preprint, with excellent map.
- 34.
In Modern Aramaic languages and a few varieties of Arabic, pharyngealization is no longer confined to individual consonants; entire words are pronounced with either a “flat” (pharyngealized/velarized) or a “plain” articulation, usually according to whether they had contained emphatic or pharyngeal consonants.
- 35.
Its close relative Phoenician more securely dates to 1000 bce. Their near relative Ugaritic survives from the thirteenth century bce.
- 36.
Its main literary varieties are Syriac (Christian) and two Jewish varieties, Babylonian and Palestinian.
- 37.
- 38.
For a decade, Djibouti was the French Territory of the Afars and Issas.
] had been used. The symbol [
], presumably for the bilabial allophone (earlier [
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Daniels, P.T. (2023). Languages of Africa. In: Joshi, R.M., McBride, C.A., Kaani, B., Elbeheri, G. (eds) Handbook of Literacy in Africa. Literacy Studies, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26250-0_2
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