African Linguistics

Why study African languages ?

•  the recognition of the enormous linguistic diversity of Africa through the description of languages which until now have not or only poorly been studied
•  the conservation of endangered languages through the collection of oral texts and the description of their vocabulary and grammar
•  the development of an adapted orthography and the composition of grammars and dictionaries, which are necessary for education and alphabetisation in African languages
•  the publication and diffusion as a book of oral literature and the development of a modern (inter)national literature accessible to everyone
•  the understanding of the early history of the continent through the interdisciplinary collaboration between historical linguistics and other disciplines, such as archaeology, palaeobotany, cultural and molecular anthropology
•  the improvement of our knowledge of the functioning of human language and languages in general, and consequently of our comprehension of man himself.

World’s languages

•  Approximately 6000 languages are spoken in the entire world. Many of these languages are not written, and many of them have even not been studied yet.
•  More than 50% of the world population speaks one of the 10 biggest languages. More than 90% of the world population speaks one of the 100 most widespread languages. This means that only 10% of the world population speaks one of the 5900 remaining languages.
•  One language may have millions of speakers or only a few hundred. The difference between a language and a dialect is not related to its number of speakers. A dialect is a linguistic variety spoken in a specific region. If two persons speak their mother tongue in a different way, but understand each other and can guess the region where the other comes from, they probably speak two different dialects of a single language.
•  Each language has a complex structure and a large vocabulary, adapted to the natural, social, technical and cultural environment where it is spoken.
•  The complexity of a language is not related to the degree of technical development of its speech community.

Facts about African languages

•  There are approximately 2000 African languages, which is about a third of the world’s languages. This number is not invariable, since new languages are still discovered, while others become extinct. Moreover, the distinction between a language and a dialect is not always easy to make.
•  The majority of these languages can be subdivided in dialects, i.e. regional varieties that are mutually intelligible.
•  The political boundaries, generally artificial in Africa, rarely correspond to the linguistic boundaries. The linguistic situation is extremely different from one state to the other.
•  In certain countries a particular dominant dialect may attain the status of national language. From a linguistic point of view, this dialect and the dialect of a neighbouring state can in reality be varieties of one and the same language. This is the case of Kinyarwanda (Rwanda) and Kirundi (Burundi), which are, together with Kiha (Tanzania), sufficiently homogenous to be considered by linguists as a single language, even if this language does not have a specific name [see map 1].
•  In some countries, the linguistic diversity of the languages is very high. In Gabon, for instance, less than two million people speak about forty different languages and no common vehicular language is used for communication between the speech communities [see map 2]. On the contrary, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, more than 240 languages are spoken [see map 3], but four national Bantu languages serve for interregional communication [see map 4].
•  In other regions as well, the communication between speech communities happens by means of vehicular languages, such as Kiswahili, which is a Bantu language, in eastern Africa or Hausa, which is a Chadic language, in western Africa [see map 5].
•  Nowadays, the majority of the national and vehicular languages are written, generally with the Arabic or Roman alphabet.
•  In Sub-Saharan Africa, some languages have been written for a long time. There exists for instance a Kikongo text which dates from 1624. Before the European colonisation, Hausa and Kiswahili, for example, had been written in Arabic writing since centuries. However, the social importance of writing varies considerably from one country to the other and from one language to the other.
•  Besides the well-known hieroglyphs from the Ancient Egypt, several other indigenous pictographic or syllabic writing systems have emerged in Africa. They are relatively recent and their use has always been restricted to well-defined social groups.
•  Contrary to certain ingrained prejudices, the culture of numerous communities is fully expressed through oral tradition : tales, stories, proverbs, genealogies, and myths are handed down orally from one generation to the other. As the writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ from Mali said: ‘The old eye perishes, but the old ear does not’. Or ‘When an old African dies, a library burns’.

Classification of African languages

•  The approximately 2000 African languages belong to four distinct phyla or (super) language families: Niger-Congo-Kordofanian, which counts 1436 languages, Afro-Asiatic, 371 languages, Nilo-Saharan, 196 languages, and Khoisan, 35 [see map 6].
•  The internal organisation of each phylum or family can be represented by means of a genealogical tree, like the one which represents the historical relationships between the Niger-Congo-Kordofanian languages [see map 7].
•  The approximately 500 Bantu languages belong to the Benue-Congo branch of Niger-Congo-Kordofanian and form the largest African language group and the one with the widest geographic distribution, i.e. from Cameroon into South-Africa [see map 8].
•  Lexicostatistical studies such as Bastin et al. (1999) draw attention to the degree of lexical proximity between Bantu languages.
  You find here the data of the 349 languages and language varieties that have been used for the study.

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Recommended introductory literature

Bastin, Yvonne, Coupez, André & Mann, Michael. 1999. Continuity and Divergence in the Bantu Languages: perspectives from a lexicostatistic study. Tervuren: Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale.
Bole-Richard, Rémy & Houis, Maurice. 1977. Intégration des langues africaines dans une politique d'enseignement. Unesco / ACCT.
Childs, Tucker. 2003. An Introduction to African Languages. Amsterdam : Benjamins.
Creissels, Denis. 1994. Aperçu sur les structures phonologiques des langues négro-africaines. Grenoble: ELLUG.
Doneux, Jean Léonce. 2003. Histoire de la linguistique africaine. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l'Université de Provence.
Heine, Bernd & Nurse, Derek (eds). 2004. Les langues africaines. Karthala : Agence universitaire de la Francophonie
Webb, Victor N. & Kembo-Sure (eds). 2000. African Voices : An Introduction to the Languages and Linguistics of Africa. Cape Town : Oxford University Press.