An Introduction to African Languages

| Portland State University
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027226051 (Eur) | EUR 125.00
ISBN 9781588114211 (USA) | USD 188.00
 
PaperbackAvailable
ISBN 9789027226068 (Eur) | EUR 50.00
ISBN 9781588114228 (USA) | USD 75.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027295880 | EUR 125.00/50.00*
| USD 188.00/75.00*
 
Google Play logo
This book introduces beginning students and non-specialists to the diversity and richness of African languages. In addition to providing a solid background to the study of African languages, the book presents linguistic phenomena not found in European languages. A goal of this book is to stimulate interest in African languages and address the question: What makes African languages so fascinating? The orientation adopted throughout the book is a descriptive one, which seeks to characterize African languages in a relatively succinct and neutral manner, and to make the facts accessible to a wide variety of readers. The author’s lengthy acquaintance with the continent and field experiences in western, eastern, and southern Africa allow for both a broad perspective and considerable depth in selected areas. The original examples are often the author’s own but also come from other sources and languages not often referenced in the literature. This text also includes a set of sound files illustrating the phenomena under discussion, be they the clicks of Khoisan, talking drums, or the ideophones (words like English lickety-split) found almost everywhere, which will make this book a valuable resource for teacher and student alike.
[Not in series, 121] 2003.  xx, 265 pp. (incl. CD-Rom)
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 21 October 2008
Table of Contents
“In this very informative introduction to African languages, Tucker Childs provides the reader with a spirited account of why this continent and its languages are so important to the study of language and human history. Those who enter its pages will enjoy the author's presentations and commentaries on the major issues and controversies that have engaged the best minds in the field over the past century and more. May it draw more enthusiasts into the fray!”
“This is an enjoyable text. The strengths outweigh the weaknesses, and all readers will learn a good deal about African languages and the African language situation.”
“Researchers such as language typologists will find the book very useful in tracking down primary sources and to students and teachers; the book could also serve as a valuable reference for field methods course. Overall, the book is excellently structured, clearly written and reader oriented. The author does a great job in pointing out the wealth of issues that characterise the study of African languages. The absence of strongly biased theoretical approaches to language study and the presence of many examples make the book suitable for non-linguists as well.”
“This is a stimulating, richly-documented, and comprehensive introduction to African linguistics, an update long overdue since William Welmers’ African Language Structures (1973). Focusing primarily on structural features that are peculiar to, or the most attested in, Africa, Tucker Childs competently relates the topics he discusses to the state of the art in theoretical linguistics, providing a useful background and also highlighting the contribution that research on them has made, or can make, to our understanding of language. He succeeds in situating African linguistics squarely in the broader domain of the study of language, while providing the expert with a useful reference and the novice with an accessible, well-informed, and critical introduction to such topics as language classification, language typology, language contact and change, phonology, morphosyntax, and pragmatics. His discussions of clicks, ideophones, tonogenesis, verb serialization and consecutivization, predicate clefting, and changes in constituent order, among a host of other interesting topics, are lucid, concise, well-illustrated, and informative features that most instructors would like a textbook to possess. This is evidently the work of an author who is extremely well read, has kept up with various subfields in African and general linguistics, and has an impressive record of field research in different parts of Africa (Liberia, Guinée, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, and Kenya) and a wide range of languages.”
“I found An Introduction to African Languages a very good read, and encountered a number of insights about these languages that I had not known, as in the discussion of language history and the use of DNA evidence, as well as syntheses of existing phenomena. It is a book that would serve undergraduates with some exposure to linguisics, as well as the sophisticated lay person who can put up with a small amount of technical notation.”
Cited by (34)

Cited by 34 other publications

Ansah, Margaret Richardson, Hannah Chimere Ugo, Isaac Adjaye Aboagye, Nii Longdon Sowah, Gifty Osei, Srinivasan S. Balapangu & Samuel Kojo Kwofie
2024. Artificial Intelligence and Health in Africa. In Examining the Rapid Advance of Digital Technology in Africa [Advances in IT Standards and Standardization Research, ],  pp. 105 ff. DOI logo
Zingler, Tim
2024. The grammaticalization of noun affixes: a cross-linguistic study. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 77:1  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Eiselen, Roald & Andiswa Bukula
2023. IsiXhosa Named Entity Recognition Resources. ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing 22:2  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Al Hosani, Naeema
2022. Language Maps from Africa to Europe. Acta Neophilologica 55:1-2  pp. 133 ff. DOI logo
Karani, Michael & Alexander Andrason
2022. Ideophones in Arusa Maasai: Syntax, morphology, and phonetics. Open Linguistics 8:1  pp. 440 ff. DOI logo
Merrill, John T. M.
2021. The evolution of consonant mutation and noun class marking in Wolof. Diachronica 38:1  pp. 64 ff. DOI logo
Andrason, Alexander & Mawande Dlali
2020. The (crucial yet neglected) category of interjections in Xhosa. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 73:2  pp. 159 ff. DOI logo
Mompean, Jose A., Amandine Fregier & Javier Valenzuela
2020. Iconicity and systematicity in phonaesthemes: A cross-linguistic study . Cognitive Linguistics 31:3  pp. 515 ff. DOI logo
Pereltsvaig, Asya
2020. Languages of the World, DOI logo
Abiolu, Rhoda Titilopemi Inioluwa & Ruth E. Teer-Tomaselli
2019. Ṣaworoidẹ. In Music and Messaging in the African Political Arena [Advances in Religious and Cultural Studies, ],  pp. 65 ff. DOI logo
H. Ekkehard Wolff
2019. The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics, DOI logo
Ndemanu, Michael Takafor & Sheri Jordan
2018. Culturally Responsive Pedagogy for African Immigrant Children in U.S. P-12 Schools. Journal of Black Studies 49:1  pp. 71 ff. DOI logo
Güldemann, Tom & Anne-Maria Fehn
2017. The Kalahari Basin Area as a ‘Sprachbund’ before the Bantu Expansion. In The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics,  pp. 500 ff. DOI logo
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide
2017. Basque ideophones from a typological perspective. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 62:2  pp. 196 ff. DOI logo
Bakker, Peter
2016. You got Gungbe, but we got the numbers. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 31:2  pp. 419 ff. DOI logo
Meierkord, Christiane
2016. Speech acts in Ugandan English social letters. In Ugandan English [Varieties of English Around the World, G59],  pp. 227 ff. DOI logo
Moran, Steven
2016. Commentary: Issues of time, tone, roots and replicability. Journal of Language Evolution 1:1  pp. 73 ff. DOI logo
Agbo, Maduabuchi Sennen
2015. Causativity and Transitivity in Igbò. Journal of Universal Language 16:2  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Agbo, Maduabuchi Sennen
2017. The morpho-syntactic coding of motion events in Igbò. Linguistique et langues africaines :3  pp. 85100 ff. DOI logo
Kubayi, Sikheto Joe & RN Madadzhe
2015. The non-derived ideophone in Xitsonga. South African Journal of African Languages 35:2  pp. 261 ff. DOI logo
Reid, Amanda, Denis Burnham, Benjawan Kasisopa, Ronan Reilly, Virginie Attina, Nan Xu Rattanasone & Catherine T. Best
2015. Perceptual assimilation of lexical tone: The roles of language experience and visual information. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 77:2  pp. 571 ff. DOI logo
Salawu, Abiodun
2015. NotIwe IrohinbutUmshumayeli: A revisit of the historiography of the early African language press. African Identities 13:2  pp. 157 ff. DOI logo
Albuyeh, Ann
2014. Poverty, Endangered Languages, and Creoles: Two Case Studies from Southern Africa and the Greater Caribbean. In Education, Creativity, and Economic Empowerment in Africa,  pp. 103 ff. DOI logo
Mchombo, Sam
2014. Language, Learning, and Education for All in Africa1. In Giving Space to African Voices [Comparative and International Education, ],  pp. 21 ff. DOI logo
Dalley, Mahlon, Jacqui Akhurst, Davies Banda, Abdelali Abdelkader, Alexandra Dick, Helena Castanheira & Eduardo Correia
2012. Views on National Security in Africa. In International Handbook of War, Torture, and Terrorism,  pp. 257 ff. DOI logo
Good, Jeff
2012. How to become a “Kwa” noun. Morphology 22:2  pp. 293 ff. DOI logo
Good, Jeff
2017. Niger-Congo Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics,  pp. 471 ff. DOI logo
Chelliah, Shobhana L. & Willem J. de Reuse
2010. Choosing a Language. In Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork,  pp. 79 ff. DOI logo
Sands, Bonny
2009. Africa's Linguistic Diversity. Language and Linguistics Compass 3:2  pp. 559 ff. DOI logo
Sands, Bonny
2022. Tracing Language Contact in Africa’s Past. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact,  pp. 84 ff. DOI logo
Childs, G. Tucker
2008. Review of Voeltz (2005): Studies in African Linguistic Typology. Studies in Language 32:4  pp. 917 ff. DOI logo
Dimmendaal, Gerrit J.
2008. Language Ecology and Linguistic Diversity on the African Continent. Language and Linguistics Compass 2:5  pp. 840 ff. DOI logo
Makoni, Sinfree B., Busi Dube & Pedzisai Mashiri
2006. Zimbabwe Colonial and Post-Colonial Language Policy and Planning Practices. Current Issues in Language Planning 7:4  pp. 377 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Language Contact and Genetic Linguistics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact,  pp. 41 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

audio

Subjects

Electronic/Multimedia Products

Electronic/Multimedia Products

Main BIC Subject

CFK: Grammar, syntax

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2003060704 | Marc record