SIL Electronic Book Reviews 2004-002

1. Introduction

“Our primary target ‘undergraduates worldwide’ is an amorphous bunch of readers” (p. 3). The editors have indeed captured the nature of their target. To aim at a group that “is lacking definite form, shapeless” (as the editors of the American Heritage Dictionary define it) is an ambitious task. I have taught undergraduate linguistics in the United States, trained mother tongue translators with widely varying education, and completed my post-graduate work in a Nigerian University. As I read the work, I was able to say, “Would Rachel understand this? Would Danladi follow the thought here? Is the vocabulary accessible to Jen, or to Basuna?” I will reserve my answer to those questions for the end of this review. Before that, you need to know about the contents of the book.

2. Structure of the book

Following the Introduction, the book is structured on topical chapters, each by a scholar in that field. The opening chapters are summaries of the basis for the four major African language families: Niger-Congo (Kay Williamson and Roger Blench), Nilo-Saharan (Lionel M. Bender), Afroasiatic (Richard Hayward), and Khoisan (Tom Güldemann and Rainer Vossen). Three structural summary chapters follow: Phonology (Nick Clements), Morphology (Gerrit Dimmendaal), and Syntax (John Watters). Typology (Denis Creissels), Comparative Linguistics (Paul Newman), Language and History (Christopher Ehret), and Language and Society (Ekkehard Wolff) round out the chapter list.

3. Review of contents

African Language Families. The Afroasiatic chapter, by Richard Hayward, is a good example of how to present a language family. The introduction section is a prose listing of the major sub-families, i.e., Chadic, Berber, Egyptian, Semitic, Cushite, and Omotic, with maps, geographic descriptions, and comments. Next comes a summary of the scholarship which developed the classification, citing scholars back as far as 1538. In just a little over two pages, Hayward takes us through four centuries of scholarship and isolates the current issues in the Afroasiatic dialogue, to wit: “A phylum with five or six coordinate branches presents an irresistible temptation for subgrouping … ” (p. 86).

Hayward goes on to provide six areas of shared morphology which link the languages into a major family: Personal pronouns; Case markers; Verbal conjugations, Plural formatives; Other morphological evidence such as verb derivation; and Lexical and phonological similarities. He provides data to illustrate the commonalities of these features. These elements can provide a field researcher with a pre-knowledge of what to expect if one will be working in an Afroasiatic language. The third person plural pronoun data for ‘them’ is a sufficient example to convey the flavor of this section.

The Khoisan chapter by Tom Güldemann and Rainer Vossen is also very well done with a wealth of examples from specific languages. I especially appreciated the clear summary statements of generalized characteristics for the group, such as: ”Non-Khoe languages possess little inflectional morphology; a phonological word is most often a bare lexical stem” (p. 108). Such information allows the reader to project the type of systems encountered in the language family.

Phonology. This chapter by Nick Clements is well suited for the task assigned in this book. A basic knowledge of phonetics and phonemic theory and processes is assumed and then applied specifically to African language structures: the following display, found on page 125, illustrates the way phonemic knowledge is assumed:

Another example is found on page 127:

Most African languages have no minimal contrast between bilabial and labiodental sounds, since plosives and nasals are usually bilabial, while affricates and fricatives are generally labiodental.

These two illustrations also illustrate what makes this book useful: well-worded summaries of the overarching similarities found in African languages. With such knowledge on hand, one is better equipped to seek out the specific structures of a given language during fieldwork. Clements does not stop with the generalizations, but also points to the exceptions to those generalizations (p. 130):

While implosive sounds are usually voiced, voiceless glottalized implosives such as bilabial [ƥ] contrast with corresponding voiced implosives in such widely separated languages as Owere Igbo, Luncu and Seereer-Siin.

In addition, Clements provides an up-to-date discussions on the status of Fortis/Lenis distinctions in phonological theory, vowel harmony, syllable structure, clicks (in which he cites !Xóõ has having “at least eighty contrastive click complexes” (p. 151)) and tone. A “Further Reading” list at the end of the section provides a way to delve deeper into the fascinations of phonology in general, and especially African language phonology.

Morphology. Gerrit Dimmendaal provides some generalizations that I find helpful in introducing people to African language structures. The following is an example (p. 171):

… many African languages have only few adjectives, that is a syntactic category formally distinct from nouns or verbs, and expressing property concepts (‘bald’, ‘old’, ‘beautiful’). In most African languages, such concepts tend to take the shape of nouns or verbs.

To illustrate, he presents the English sentences She is strong and She is stronger than Musa, and provides the Hausa equivalents, glossed ‘She has strength’ and ‘She has strength surpassing Musa’.

Syntax. The presentation of syntax by John Watters is fitting with the stated objectives of the editors to reach linguistic students at the undergraduate level. He not only provides generalizations about African languages, he includes brief explanatory statements for the linguistic phenomena, e.g. (p. 201):

Within the sentence, noun phrases may be cross referenced in the verb phrase. Most commonly these would be the subject and object noun phrases. For example, … a verb usually contains an affix that cross-references it to the subject noun phrase. This kind of obligatory cross-referencing is often referred to as ‘agreement’.

This chapter is illustrated with a wide variety of African language data. In the section on negation, Watters cites data from nine different languages: Aghem, Lobala, Igbo, Fer, Tera, Hausa, Logbara, Kru, and Linda, representing various language families and phyla.

Typology, Comparative Linguistics, and Language and History. In deference to the space demands of a review of this nature, I will simply say that these three chapters continue the pattern exemplified above, explaining basic linguistic concepts and illustrating them from African Language data. All three are well written and merit careful reading.

Language and Society. Ekkehard Wolff, in a span of just under fifty pages, addresses nearly every area of concern in sociolinguistics: participants, language versus dialect, domains, multilingualism, language shift and maintenance, language planning and policy, code-switching, prestige, etc. are all provided with a brief explanation of the concept, and a summary statement of the manner in which that concept is present in the speech communities of Africa. This wide scope and limited space result in a chapter relatively light in specific illustrative examples when compared to the companion chapters in this volume. To be fair, it is much easier to list a few words or sentences with glosses than it is to provide the prose explanations of setting and social factors plus the fully glossed transcriptions of dialogue that are necessary for sociolinguistic illustrations within the space constraints of a book of this nature.

4. Summary

James Herriot, the popular veterinarian author, made reference to a book on the anatomy of the eye which his partner read frequently, as a cure for insomnia. When I started reading African Languages, I found myself more likely to stay up late than to nod off. At the beginning of this review, I promised to report on how my students Rachel, Danladi, Jen, and Basuna would understand the work. Was the reasoning clear, was the vocabulary accessible, were the data examples adequate? I would say, “Sometimes.” Most of the linguistic undergraduate students I have worked with could follow the information as presented here if they were in a setting where they could ask questions of a teacher or linguistic colleague, and check a good linguistics dictionary such as Crystal.

African Languages, An Introduction, provides anyone teaching linguistics a source of data from African languages, pre-selected to illustrate the desired concepts. It also provides explanations of those concepts. To someone expecting to work with African languages, it provides a compact reference volume to help answer the questions of What am I likely to find in the syntax of the languages where I am going? In the phonology? What are the sociolinguistic dynamics I can expect? and a host of other similar questions. To those interested in a particular field of linguistic theory, it is an excellent resource to start the search for African language influences in that field.