Issues in African Language Phonology

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2008) Issues in African language phonology Larry M. Hyman University of California, Berkeley [The following is my section of a joint chapter “Theoretical/descriptive and typological issues“ with Denis Creissels and Jeff Good to appear in the Africa volume (Tom Gueldemann, ed.) in the “Fields of Linguistics” Series (Hans Hock, ed.; Mouton de Gruyter)]. Introduction In this section I discuss some of the major phonological properties of African languages that are of particular significance for general linguistics. The historical relation between African and general phonology has been a mutually beneficial one: the languages of the African continent provide some of the most interesting and, at times, unusual phonological phenomena, which have contributed to the development of phonology in quite central ways. This has been made possible by the careful descriptive work that has been done on African languages, by linguists and non-linguistics, and by Africanists and non-Africans who have peeked in from time to time. Except for the click consonants of the Khoisan languages (which spill over into some neighboring Bantu languages that have “borrowed” them), the phonological phenomena found in African languages are usually duplicated elsewhere on the globe, though not always in as concentrated a fashion. The vast majority of African languages are tonal, and many also have vowel harmony (especially the types known as ATR- and vowel-height harmony). Not surprisingly, then, African languages have figured disproportionately in theoretical treatments of these two phenomena. On the other hand, if there is a phonological property where African languages are underrepresented, it would have to be stress systems—which rarely, if ever, achieve the complexity found in other (mostly non-tonal) languages. However, it should be noted that African languages have contributed significantly to virtually every other aspect of general phonology. Given the considerable diversity of the properties found in different parts of the continent, as well as in different genetic groups or areas, it will not be possible to provide a comprehensive account of the phonological phenomena found in African languages, overviews of which are available in such works as Creissels (1994) and Clements (2000). Most recently, Clements & Rialland (2008) treat African phonology from an areal perspective. Drawing from a database of 150 African languages, they address a range of phonological properties which have significant African distributions as compared with a non-African database of 345 languages. They begin with three consonant types which are characteristic of languages within their “Sudanic belt”, a vast area which stretches from Senegal in the West, “bounded roughly by the Sahel to the north and the equatorial rain forest to the south” (p.38): (i) Labial flaps are found “in at least seventy African languages, heavily concentrated in the center of the Sudanic belt in an area encompassing northern Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), and adjoining parts of Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)” (p.41). (ii) The labiovelar stops /kp/ and /gb/ which have 54 attestations each, followed by /Ngb/ (13) and /Nm/ (7).