Ethnolinguistic Continuity on the Guinea Coast

Abstract

An inventory of ethnolinguistic units on the Guinea coast can be drawn from early written sources, that is, from Portuguese and other European records of between 1440 and 1700. When this inventory is compared with the present-day inventory it is found that, in the particulars cited, the units have remained very much the same for three, four, or five centuries. Summary evidence relating to the coast, section by section, from the Senegal River to the Cameroons River, is presented, and this includes reference to the linguistic evidence provided by early vocabularies. Not only do all earlier units correspond to present-day units, but the sequence of units along the coast is the same in the earlier as in the present-day inventory. However, some of the units have expanded or contracted; and one of the modern units (Mende) is not recorded before 1700. It is finally suggested that research into the documented period of continuity, through study of the written records, should precede attempts to evaluate the accounts of Völkerwanderungen supplied generously in oral traditions.

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