Teaching and Learning Guide for: Africa’s Linguistic Diversity

Linguistic diversity is one of the rich endowments of the African continent. Language has a lot of potential benefits to the world at large and, most especially, to the people who speak it. However, in the present globalised world, language endangerment has become a stark reality as many world languages threaten the survival of the weaker ones spoken by the numerous indigenous people. In this mere linguistic warfare which the world has been plunged into, languages that are well-developed and have more speakers have greater chances of surviving. Due to the large number of languages in Africa, it may appear, on the periphery, asthough these languages are safe. However, available statistics shows that the wave of language endangerment is already sweeping through the continent, as a result of which many African languages have gone into extinction and many are heading towardsthe same fate, unless a drastic action is taken. No part of Africa is safe and almost all African languages are threatened to some degree. This paper exposes the conditions of African indigenous languages and the need for actions to be taken to avert linguistic genocide in the continent.

Reviewed by: Issues of minority peoples ed. by Frances Karttunen, Jan-Ola Östman Edward J. Vajda Issues of minority peoples. Ed. by Frances Karttunen and Jan-Ola Östman. (Department of General Linguistics publication 31.) Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2000. Pp. iv, 140. During the late 1990’s several scholars at the University of Helsinki’s Department of General Linguistics embarked on the creation of a center devoted to the study of lesser-known and endangered languages, particularly those of the Americas. An outgrowth of that new direction, this short volume combines papers by the university’s professors and graduate students with writings by recent visiting scholars. Though its title conceals it, the book deals primarily with the sociohistorical phenomenon of language endangerment. The editors identify the book’s general theme as composed of several related topics, including global loss of linguistic and biological diversity, modern pressures toward linguistic and cultural assimilation, and the efforts currently under way to revitalize or at least document the world’s disappearing languages. The three sections composing the book are entitled ‘Issues’, ‘Case studies’, and ‘Epilogue’. The ‘issues’ section contains three articles. In ‘Expansion and collision’ (13–15), historian Alfred Crosby combines ecological and linguistic history in a brief essay devoted to the origin of language diversity and the factors threatening it today. ‘Raising the alarm for endangered languages’ (16–36), by Frances Karttunen, continues this discussion in an equally engaging way, comparing efforts to revitalize endangered languages in Ireland, New Zealand, and Hawaii, among other places. Both essays reiterate points articulated by the authors in their earlier writings (notably ‘Language death, language genesis, and world history’, Frances Karttunen & Alfred Crosby, Journal of world history 6(2).157–74, 1995). Jan-Ola Östman’s ‘Ethics and appropriation—with special reference to Hwalbáy’ (37–60) discusses ethical questions faced by linguists writing about or performing fieldwork in conjunction with indigenous peoples or minorities; the author uses specific examples from Hualapai (spelled Hwalbáy in the tribe’s own writing system). Only one of the ‘case studies’ in the book really qualifies as such from a linguistic standpoint. In ‘Towards additive multilingualism: A sociolinguistics perspective on the maintenance of Alabama and Coushatta in Texas’ (63–97), Helena Halmari discusses the results of her fieldwork among a group that has preserved fluency in two Muskogean languages. The article surveys the relevant sociolinguistic history and provides an excellent evaluation of current linguistic attitudes, with specific suggestions for language maintenance and revitalization. Dianaben-Aaron’s ‘Language and minorities on U.S. Independence Day: “A note of color” ’ (99–130) is an essay on recent American ethnohistory and the evolution of public perceptions of American nationalism. The book’s ‘epilogue’, written by Alfred Crosby and Frances Karttunen and entitled ‘Biodiversity and linguistic diversity: Collision and reduction’ (133–40), returns to the theme of the massive loss of indigenous American languages due to sociopolitical and ecological factors during the past half-millennium. Language shift among immigrant communities in the United States is also discussed, based on the specific example of the Wendish (Sorbian) population of Central Texas. This rather short book is a heartfelt and welcome addition to the growing literature on language endangerment. However, with the exception of H’s article on Alabama and Coushatta, the individual contributions qualify mainly as good popular science writing intended for a general audience and offer little of novelty for the serious linguist. Edward J. Vajda Western Washington University Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America

Problematic Use of Greenberg's Linguistic Classification of the Americas in Studies of Native American Genetic Variation

Introduction: Places with high species diversity have high linguistic diversity, whereas areas with low species diversity tend to have low linguistic diversity. Objective: To characterize the intriguing relationship between biological and cultural diversity, a correlation that has been discussed at a global scale, but here tested for the first time in Mexico. Methods: We compiled exhaustive databases on both endangered species and endangered languages, and reviewed available literature on Mexico’s biocultural diversity with a focus on endangered and critically endangered species and languages. Results: With 364 living languages, Mexico is the world’s fifth most linguistically diverse country, but 64 of these languages are facing a very high risk of disappearance and 13 have already disappeared. Mexico is also the fourth most biologically diverse country, but 1 213 species of its flora and fauna are threatened with extinction and at least 127 species were recently extinct. Conclusions: Indigenous peoples are custodians of much of the world’s biocultural diversity. As the world grows less linguistically and culturally diverse, it is also becoming less biologically diverse. Mexico’s biological and linguistic diversity show strong geographic overlap, with the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Veracruz, Guerrero, and Michoacán harboring most species and most languages. Similarly, Mexico’s biodiversity hotspots mirror language hotspots, and areas with the highest number of endangered species overlap with areas where the endangerment of languages is also the highest.

This chapter explores the challenges and opportunities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, specifically focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its implications for linguistic and educational diversity in African higher education. As AI technologies like ChatGPT expand, concerns arise about impacts on critical thinking, linguistic diversity, and stylistic richness. The chapter argues that global ChatGPT use may exacerbate disparities between languages with high AI compatibility and those with limited tools, potentially fostering a new digital divide. Using selected Nigerian universities as a case study, this research addresses questions on the adaptability of AI to diverse African languages, the need for curriculum adjustments, and the risks of linguistic hegemony. Findings indicate that while AI offers significant educational benefits, its adoption in Africa must consider preserving linguistic diversity. Consequently, this chapter recommends developing policies supporting equitable AI access while promoting cultural and linguistic heritage.

This paper examines the increasing concerns about language endangerment in Sub-Saharan Africa, and assesses the necessity and practicality of language revitalization efforts in some situations in the region in light of a number of practical problems of implementation. The paper identifies the need for a clearer paradigm of revitalization efforts, and recommends an approach that recognizes the hard reality that not all endangered languages can receive attention toward functional restoration due to the practical matters involved. The paper proposes archival preservation in such cases, while strongly supporting functional revitalization where the concerned languages a meet some suggested thresholds of viability. Key Words: African languages, language revitalization, language endanger-ment, language death.

After outlining the current state of linguistic diversity and language endangerment, this chapter examines the nature of the geographic interface between linguistic and ecological diversity. It explains why the extinction of languages is part of the larger picture of near-total collapse of the worldwide ecosystem, and why languages are vital parts of complex local ecologies that must be supported if global biodiversity is to be maintained. In view of the strong relationship between areas of potential endangerment for species and for languages and their associated cultures, the chapter suggests that integrated strategies need to be developed to ensure the survival of both human diversity and biological diversity on our rapidly globalizing planet.

At the end of the eighteenth century, between 250 and 700 languages were spoken on the Australian continent. No genetic link has been proven between these languages and those elsewhere, and there was remarkably little contact between speakers of Australian aboriginal languages and others during the tens of thousands of years that intervened between the first occupation of the continent and the arrival of English speakers. Although there are many hallmarks of Australian phonologies, morphology and syntax, as well as recurrent themes in semantic categorization and the linguistic reflexes of cultural preoccupations, there is considerable current debate over which of these may be attributed to shared inheritance from a common ancestor and which to more recent contact between linguistic groups. A course on the aboriginal languages of Australia might cover: (i) the structural features typical of Australian languages (highlighting those that are atypical in global perspective); (ii) whether and how these can be related to typical features of Australian cultures; (iii) the particular challenges Australian languages have posed to linguistic theories and typologies developed on the basis of other languages; and (iv) the genetic relationships between Australian languages and how well these are modelled by traditional methodologies.

Our aim in this chapter is to investigate to what extent it is possible to pick up signals of prehistoric events by studying the distribution of typological diversity across the languages of Africa. The chapter is experimental, in the sense that it aims to test a particular method rather than to assume that the method in question is valid. The results of the investigation will show that, while there are clear limitations especially as one goes further back into history, nonetheless there are clear signals of prehistoric events that can be traced in the geography of typological diversity in Africa. Our aim is not to develop a method that will replace other methods, in particular the comparative method in historical linguistics (Campbell 2004), but rather to see what contributions can be made in specific areas by other methods, in this particular case areal typology.

There has been some discussion in the literature on endangered languages about the role – or lack thereof – of colonial languages in presenting a threat to African languages. The view most often offered suggests that in Africa it has typically been African languages, in the form of national languages and regional lingua francas, that endanger smaller, local languages. If this is the case, the task of linguists concerned with the causes of language endangerment is to understand why Africa has not felt the threat of colonial languages in the same way or to the same extent as other regions of the world, such as the Americas or Australia. In this paper I re-examine the question of the role of colonial languages in language endangerment in Africa. A review of literature on colonialist language ideologies and attitudes towards African languages, together with the results of several sociolinguistic surveys into language choice and attitudes, leads me to question the prevailing view. Whether colonial languages are replacing – i.e. directly replacing – African languages is only part of the story. Their use reduces African languages in terms of both prestige and structure, and this contributes to their endangerment. Finally, and from a more general perspective, the pressure to create a ‘modern nation state’, on a Western (colonial) model, in requiring a single unifying language, must be seen as an important factor in language endangerment in Africa.

This study explores the role of ecolinguistics in preserving linguistic diversity amid globalization, where dominant world languages threaten the survival of local and indigenous tongues. Grounded in the ecolinguistics view that language is part of the ecological system, the research examines how linguistic diversity supports cultural and environmental sustainability. Employing a qualitative multi-method design-combining Critical Ecolinguistics Discourse Analysis (CEDA), documentary review, and comparative case studies-the study analyzes policies, media narratives, and community practices influencing language vitality. Data were collected from policy documents, UNESCO reports, NGO publications, and media texts on language endangerment and revitalization. Findings show that language loss parallels ecological degradation, as languages encode environmental knowledge and sustainable traditions vital for human–nature balance. Globalization’s ideologies of progress and uniformity foster linguistic homogenization, resembling the ecological impact of monocultures. Ecolinguistics highlights the “stories we live by” (Stibbe, 2021)—discourses that either sustain or threaten both linguistic and ecological diversity. Revitalization movements reveal that linking language with ecological awareness strengthens identity and community resilience. Ultimately, ecolinguistics offers both analytical and practical tools for integrating language preservation into sustainability agendas, aligning linguistic and ecological justice to build sustainable futures for people and the planet

In Translation:Paulin Soumanou Vieyra Mélissa Gélinas "First Comes the Ear": Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and the Politics of African Languages Those years of growing awareness were also years of ember … Africa was looking ahead. … Witness to such key moments, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra filmed everything … day and night. —Ousmane Sembène, "Moment d'une vie: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra" Seldom is the historian also a witness to and even, to a certain extent, an artisan of that whose history it tells. Such is Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, a man invested in African cinema on so many levels. —Présence africaine, "Le cinéma africain: Des origines à 1973" Films have been made and seen in Africa since cinema's inception, but the 1950s mark the time when Africans themselves gained access to the equipment and training necessary to start making their own films. In a decade rife with decolonizing ruptures, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–1987) would spearhead the establishment of African cinema as a filmmaker, theorist, and historian. I have selected the texts translated here, "Film and the Problem of Languages in Africa" (1975) and "Remarks on African Cinema" (1978), because they highlight an important thread in the evolution of Vieyra's multilayered engagement with African cinema: his unwavering commitment to recognize the cultural and political significance of African national languages for establishing an African cinema. These translations reveal the extent to which Vieyra's views on language in the African postcolonial context shaped his ideas about cinematic ontology, the technological and institutional implications of audiovisual translation (especially dubbing) in the management of cinematic multilingualism, and the cinema's role in disrupting colonial legacies. At the same time, the selected pieces showcase some of the many roles that Vieyra played throughout his life in the emergence of postcolonial African cinema. [End Page 118] Published as part of Vieyra's pioneering summative history of African cinema (Le cinéma africain: Des origines à 1973), the chapter "Film and the Problem of Languages in Africa" (1975) starts with an outline of the reasons African languages are marginalized as legitimate vehicles of knowledge and culture. This necessary preamble then serves to propel Vieyra's argument in favor of a cultural policy that would ensure that cinema in Africa uses African languages as key vectors of knowledge about Africa and as the support on which its visual cultures are deployed. Ultimately, Vieyra argues in favor of dubbing as a way to make African cinema more accessible to Africans and to help establish more equal cultural exchanges between the newly decolonized African nations and between these nations and the rest of the world. The second translated text, "Remarks on African Cinema" (1978), is an interview that took place between Vieyra and African cinema scholar Pierre Haffner (1943–2000) while both attended the Seventh Carthage Film Festival in Tunis. This interview demonstrates how the ideas developed in the previous piece come to bear on Vieyra's conception of cinematic ontology. The interview also situates Vieyra's work in the late 1970s as a filmmaker, as Ousmane Sembène's production manager, and as a critic and historian.1 To film and media scholars, the most interesting part of this piece will likely be the "first comes the ear" theory that Vieyra briefly outlines. According to Vieyra, the cinematic medium is first and foremost grounded in language and sound, so that when audiences experience a "mixed visual" such as sound cinema, that experience is informed first and foremost by what meets the ear, more so than the eye. Vieyra's conceptualization of the cinematic medium is thus deeply informed by his understanding of orality as central to African cultures, a phenomenon whose relationship to African cinema he contextualized in "Film and the Problem of Languages in Africa." By diverging from the primacy of the visual, Vieyra's 1970s writings can be seen to turn film theory on its head in ways generally attributed to Western figures such as Michel Chion. And while Vieyra's "first comes the ear" theory is but one of several elements that can be derived from his writings and thinking on film, its renegotiation of the audiovisual contract stands out because it constitutes an unrecognized contribution...

Reviewed by: Africa's endangered languages: Documentary and theoretical approaches eds. by Jason Kandybowicz and Harold Torrence Christopher R. Green Africa's endangered languages: Documentary and theoretical approaches. Ed. Jason Kandybowicz and Harold Torrence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 503. ISBN 9780190256357. $99 (Hb). Africa's endangered languages: Documentary and theoretical approaches brings together contributions from scholars who presented at the 45th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. The editors, Jason Kandybowicz and Harold Torrence, co-organized the conference, whose theme was focused on raising awareness of the interconnectedness between language documentation and linguistic theory, casting aside long-standing views holding the two as largely separate and unrelated ventures. This volume offers perspectives on these approaches and how research programs that combine them ultimately yield stronger and more robust outcomes. Several of the chapters in the volume have been written with this interconnectedness clearly in mind, while a few others appear to have focused on theory first, with only a brief subsection related to documentation added as more of an afterthought. There are nineteen chapters, all of which, either directly or indirectly, address combined documentary/theoretical approaches to African language research. One is immediately struck by the array of issues covered, from methodological approaches to case studies ranging from phonetics to formal syntax. The contributor list contains many seasoned African linguistics scholars, but also junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, independent researchers, and students. In Ch. 1, Jason Kandybowicz and Harold Torrence provide background on the state of research on endangered African languages compared to analogous work in other world regions. They argue that work on African languages lags behind partly due to a misconception that these languages are not as threatened as others because the linguistic threats against them are 'internal' rather than from nonindigenous colonial languages. The editors discuss 'symbiosis' between documentary and theoretical approaches, which resurfaces in subsequent chapters. The rest of the volume is separated into thematic sections, though this is not indicated nor necessarily clear from the table of contents. Ch. 2 is a survey of endangered languages in Africa. Chs. 3–6 stem from one documentation project, and Chs. 7–8 describe community-based approaches to documentation. Chs. 9–12 cover topics more aligned with morphology and syntax, while Chs. 15–19 concern themselves primarily with phonetics and phonology. Chs. 13–14 bridge the gap between the two broader topic areas in focusing on morphophonology. An overview of often conflicting perspectives on African language endangerment is given by Bonny Sands (Ch. 2); she illustrates how complexities/conflicts stem from incompatible, in [End Page 717] complete, or outdated assumptions and terminologies used in categorizing and quantifying a cline of endangerment. Sands's high-level view shows that agencies/surveys may appeal to a single criterion in making designations of endangerment, while ignoring pressing factors like population marginalization. The topic and related terminology are inherently complex, though the details become more so due to how certain facts are presented. The chapter is informative but requires side-bar searching and clarification to fully understand the terminology and how it relates to the issue at hand. The following four chapters present research on Nata that grew out of a field methods course at the University of British Columbia. The work of the Nata Working Group centers upon the role of graduate student Joash J. Gambarage as a speaker-linguist. There is significant redundancy between the first of these chapters and those that follow; in my view, the initial overview chapter (Ch. 3) is not necessary. In Ch. 4, Gambarage and Douglas Pulleyblank then discuss alternations arising from competing pressures between root-internal, root-controlled, and suffix-controlled tongue-root harmony, which they tackle within an 'emergent allomorph' framework (Archangeli & Pulleyblank 2012). Andrei Anghelescu, Gambarage, Zoe Wai-Man Lam, and Pulleyblank illustrate the close parallels between the morphological structures and tonal behaviors of Nata nouns and verbs in Ch. 5. The data and analysis are clearly and systematically presented, though I found myself curious about how the behavior of Nata's reflexive prefix might align with that of other...

This paper examines the increasing concerns about language endangerment in Sub-Saharan Africa, and assesses the necessity and practicality of language revitalization efforts in some situations in the region in light of a number of practical problems of implementation. The paper identifies the need for a clearer paradigm of revitalization efforts, and recommends an approach that recognizes the hard reality that not all endangered languages can receive attention toward functional restoration due to the practical matters involved. The paper proposes archival preservation in such cases, while strongly supporting functional revitalization where the concerned languages a meet some suggested thresholds of viability.Key Words: African languages, language revitalization, language endanger-ment, language death.

Relatively little is known about Africa’s endangered languages. In an era when we are racing against time to study and preserve the world’s threatened languages before they go extinct, a disproportionately low amount of research and funding is devoted to the study of endangered African languages when compared to any other linguistically threatened region in the world. More regrettably, even less has been done to create a community of Africanists and concerned linguists who might work on rectifying this situation. This book puts some of Africa’s many endangered languages in the spotlight in the hope of reversing this trend. Both documentary and theoretical perspectives are taken with a view toward highlighting the symbiotic relationship between the two approaches and exploring its consequences for research on and preservation of endangered languages, both in the African context and more broadly. The articles that comprise this volume collectively advocate nurturing synergistic partnerships between documentary and theoretical linguists researching endangered African languages in order to stimulate and enhance the depth, visibility, and impact of endangered African language research in the service of altering the landscape of scholarship and activism in this field.