Artefactual ideologies and the textual production of African languages

Abstract

This paper discusses ideologically structured textual practices in the study of African languages. The practices are practices of artefactualisation: the extraction of essential ‘form’ out of text, and the representation of such form as ‘language’. They fit into an inductivist paradigm which, through philology, has dominated the emergence of African linguistics. Genres of artefactualisation thus document the emergence of a professional corps in African linguistics, and I shall examine one such mature professional genre: the ‘grammatical sketch’, a concise core-linguistic description in the fashion of Boas’ Handbook of American Indian Languages. These artefactualisations, however, also have another function: they are often the ‘birth certificates’ of a language, since it is the deployment of such mature professional representations of languages that defines them as languages.