Tracing Language Movement in Africa

Abstract

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.

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