Language History and Linguistic Description in Africa

Language History and Linguistic Description in Africa PDF Author: Ian Maddieson
Publisher: Africa World Press
ISBN: 9780865436329
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
For more than a quarter of a century the Annual conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) has provided a lively forum for the confrontation of ideas on theoretical linguistics with descriptive data on African languages.

Language History and Linguistic Description in Africa

Language History and Linguistic Description in Africa PDF Author: Ian Maddieson
Publisher: Africa World Press
ISBN: 9780865436329
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
For more than a quarter of a century the Annual conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) has provided a lively forum for the confrontation of ideas on theoretical linguistics with descriptive data on African languages.

Language and History in Africa

Language and History in Africa PDF Author: David Dalby
Publisher: Frank Cass Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Languages and Linguistics of Africa

The Languages and Linguistics of Africa PDF Author: Tom Güldemann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110421755
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1180

Get Book Here

Book Description
This innovative handbook takes a fresh look at the currently underestimated linguistic diversity of Africa, the continent with the largest number of languages in the world. It covers the major domains of linguistics, offering both a representative picture of Africa’s linguistic landscape as well as new and at times unconventional perspectives. The focus is not so much on exhaustiveness as on the fruitful relationship between African and general linguistics and the contributions the two domains can make to each other. This volume is thus intended for readers with a specific interest in African languages and also for students and scholars within the greater discipline of linguistics.

Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages

Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages PDF Author: Gerrit J. Dimmendaal
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027287228
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Get Book Here

Book Description
This advanced historical linguistics course book deals with the historical and comparative study of African languages. The first part functions as an elementary introduction to the comparative method, involving the establishment of lexical and grammatical cognates, the reconstruction of their historical development, techniques for the subclassification of related languages, and the use of language-internal evidence, more specifically the application of internal reconstruction. Part II addresses language contact phenomena and the status of language in a wider, cultural-historical and ecological context. Part III deals with the relationship between comparative linguistics and other disciplines. In this rich course book, the author presents valuable views on a number of issues in the comparative study of African languages, more specifically concerning genetic diversity on the African continent, the status of pidginised and creolised languages, language mixing, and grammaticalisation.

The Languages and Linguistics of Africa

The Languages and Linguistics of Africa PDF Author: Tom Güldemann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110421666
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1032

Get Book Here

Book Description
This innovative handbook takes a fresh look at the currently underestimated linguistic diversity of Africa, the continent with the largest number of languages in the world. It covers the major domains of linguistics, offering both a representative picture of Africa’s linguistic landscape as well as new and at times unconventional perspectives. The focus is not so much on exhaustiveness as on the fruitful relationship between African and general linguistics and the contributions the two domains can make to each other. This volume is thus intended for readers with a specific interest in African languages and also for students and scholars within the greater discipline of linguistics.

The Swahili

The Swahili PDF Author: Derek Nurse
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512821667
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Get Book Here

Book Description
"As an introduction to how the history of an African society can be reconstructed from largely nonliterate sources, and to the Swahili in particular, . . . a model work."—International Journal of African Historical Studies

Language and Development in Africa

Language and Development in Africa PDF Author: Ekkehard Wolff
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107088550
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores the central role of language across all aspects of public and private life in Africa.

Tracing Language Movement in Africa

Tracing Language Movement in Africa PDF Author: Ericka A. Albaugh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190657553
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
The great diversity of ethnicities and languages in Africa encourages a vision of Africa as a fragmented continent, with language maps only perpetuating this vision by drawing discrete language groups. In reality, however, most people can communicate with most others within and across linguistic boundaries, even if not in languages taught or learned in schools. Many disciplines have looked carefully at language movement and change on the continent, but their lack of interaction has prevented the emergence of a cohesive picture of African languages. Tracing Language Movement in Africa gathers eighteen scholars together to offer a truly multidisciplinary representation of language in Africa, combining insights from history, archaeology, religion, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. The resulting volume illuminates commonalities and distinctions in these disciplines' understanding of language change and movement in Africa. The volume is empirical -- aiming to represent language more accurately on the continent -- as well as theoretical. It identifies the theories that each discipline uses to make sense of language movement in Africa in plain terms and highlights the themes that cut across all disciplines: how scholars use data, understand boundaries, represent change, and conceptualize power. The volume 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 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 non-specialists, followed by an illustrative empirical case study. This volume will inspire multidisciplinary conversations around the study of language change in Africa, opening new interdisciplinary dialogue and spurring scholars to adapt the questions, data, and method of other disciplines to the problems that animate their own fields.

The Story of Swahili

The Story of Swahili PDF Author: John M. Mugane
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0896804895
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
Swahili was once an obscure dialect of an East African Bantu language. Today more than one hundred million people use it: Swahili is to eastern and central Africa what English is to the world. From its embrace in the 1960s by the black freedom movement in the United States to its adoption in 2004 as the African Union’s official language, Swahili has become a truly international language. How this came about and why, of all African languages, it happened only to Swahili is the story that John M. Mugane sets out to explore. The remarkable adaptability of Swahili has allowed Africans and others to tailor the language to their needs, extending its influence far beyond its place of origin. Its symbolic as well as its practical power has evolved from its status as a language of contact among diverse cultures, even as it embodies the history of communities in eastern and central Africa and throughout the Indian Ocean world. The Story of Swahili calls for a reevaluation of the widespread assumption that cultural superiority, military conquest, and economic dominance determine a language’s prosperity. This sweeping history gives a vibrant, living language its due, highlighting its nimbleness from its beginnings to its place today in the fast-changing world of global communication.

Language in South Africa

Language in South Africa PDF Author: Rajend Mesthrie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521791052
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 526

Get Book Here

Book Description
A wide-ranging guide to language and society in South Africa. The book surveys the most important language groupings in the region in terms of wider socio-historical processes; contact between the different language varieties; language and public policy issues associated with post-apartheid society and its eleven official languages.