For both scholars and the informed layman, the great diversity of ethnicities and languages in Africa invites notions of Africa as a fragmented place. Our language maps perpetuate the image by drawing discrete language groups. In fact, most people can communicate with most others within and across their state boundaries. Many disciplines look carefully at language movement and change on the continent, but seldom do they engage with each other. This book gathers eighteen scholars to do just that, offering insights from history, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. The resulting volume illuminates commonalities and distinctions in our disciplines’ understanding of language change and movement in Africa. The book is organized to reflect differing conceptions of language that arise from its discipline-specific contributions: that is, tendencies to study changes that consolidate language or those that splinter it, viewing languages as a whole or in part. Each contribution includes a short explanation of a discipline’s theoretical and methodological approaches to language movement and change to ensure that the chapters are accessible to nonspecialists, followed by an illustrative empirical case study. The organization of the volume will inspire interdisciplinary conversations around the study of language change in Africa, opening new interdisciplinary dialogue and inspiring scholars to adapt the questions, data, and methods of other disciplines to the problems that animate their own field.
Author(s): Ericka Ann Albaugh; Kathryn Michelle De Luna
Edition: online
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 426
Tags: Africa; language; linguistics; multilingualism; creole; political science; history; anthropology; archaeology; philosophy; sociolinguistics
1. Toward an Interdisciplinary Perspective on Language Movement and Change / Ericka A. Albaugh and Kathryn M. de Luna
Part I: Describing and Classifying Language Movement and Change
2. Language Change and Movement as Seen by Historical Linguistics / Derek Nurse
3. The Ethnologue and L2 Mapping / Kenneth S. Olson and M. Paul Lewis
4. Understanding Distributions of Chadic Languages: Archaeological Perspectives / Scott MacEachern
5. 800 Languages and Counting: Lessons from Survey Research across a Linguistically Diverse Continent / Carolyn Logan
Part II: Forces of Fixity and Consolidation
6. Conquest and Contact in North African Languages / Moha Ennaji
7. Ajami Literacies of West Africa / Fallou Ngom
8. Vernacular Language and Political Imagination / Derek R. Peterson
9. Language Movement and Civil War in West Africa / Ericka A. Albaugh
10. How a Lingua Franca Spreads / Fiona McLaughlin
Part III: Influences on Fragmentation, Transformation, and Recombination
11. Scales and Units: Language Movement and Change in Central Africa / Kathryn M. de Luna
12. Localizing the Global: The Wanderwörter of Nineteenth-Century South Central Africa / David M. Gordon
13. The Invisible Niche of AUYL / Phillip W. Rudd
14. Language Movement and Pragmatic Change in a Conflict Area: The Border Triangle of Uganda, Rwanda, and DR Congo / Nico Nassenstein
Part IV: Traveling Remnants: African Languages and the Diaspora
15. The African Diaspora and Language: Movement, Borrowing, and Return / Maureen Warner-Lewis
16. Metaphors to Live By in the Diaspora: Conceptual Tropes and Ontological Wordplay among Central Africans in the Middle Passage and Beyond / Robert W. Slenes
17. Caribbean French-African Creole and African Metaphysics / Hanétha Vété-Congolo
18. Population Movements, Language Contact, Linguistic Diversity, Etc.: A Postscript/ Salikoko S. Mufwene
