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Autre publication scientifique Année : 2013

Language and the Study of Africa

Résumé

Africa is home to a substantial portion of the world’s linguistic diversity. Estimating the total number of different languages is difficult, given that much of Africa is in dialect continuum-like situations, new languages continue to be discovered, and others die out, but the commonly cited estimate of Ethnologue is about two thousand. Multilingualism prevails, and Nigeria alone has more than 450 languages. The study of African languages has motivated many contributions to the theory of language, notably by revolutionizing the understanding of tonal phonology (e.g., using the autosegmental approach) and informing lexicalist approaches to syntax. It has also proved to be a crucial tool for documenting and understanding contact-induced language change and social change in Africa; as anywhere else in the world, to study a society one must study its language. The dearth of reliable early documentation for much of the continent makes comparative-historical linguistics an even more important key to the history of Africa than it is for many other regions. Nonetheless, one of the earliest writing systems of the world originated on the African continent among speakers of the Afroasiatic language Ancient Egyptian, and a number of different scripts remain in use there, posing interesting challenges for educational policy and information technology. The languages of Africa fall into four major families, as proposed by Greenberg 1966 (cited under Language, Society, and History): Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan (Malagasy belongs to Austronesian). The preexisting languages spoken by indigenous Pygmies are presumed to have been replaced. In practice, however, this classification probably underestimates the linguistic diversity of Africa. The more cautious list in Dimmendaal 2011 (cited under Language, Society, and History), for example, gives eleven language families plus eight isolates. Of these, the most widely used serve as transnational lingua francas—for example, Manding, Hausa, and Fula(ni) in the Sahel; Yoruba in Nigeria and Benin; Lingala in the Congo basin; Swahili in East and central Africa; and Arabic varieties in North Africa, Chad, and Sudan. Ex-colonial (European) languages also play an important role in modern-day Africa, notably as official languages, while pidgins and creoles based on European and major indigenous languages have emerged as tools of communication in multiethnic situations. Sign languages are used in Africa as in other parts of the world, often independently of formal deaf education systems; most remain inadequately documented or entirely undocumented.
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Dates et versions

halshs-01376228, version 1 (04-10-2016)

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Lameen Souag, Philip J. Jaggar. Language and the Study of Africa. 2013, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199846733/obo-9780199846733-0030.xml. ⟨10.1093/obo/9780199846733-0030⟩. ⟨halshs-01376228⟩
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Dernière date de mise à jour le 28/04/2024
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