Histoire de la linguistique africaine des précurseurs aux années 70 (review)

The history of African linguistics is not always pretty and this book tells us how and why this is so. But despite ideology, quirky methodology, and overbearing personalities, the study of African languages has pressed on. Jean Doneux’s book ends with 1970 but presents thoroughly and carefully what went before. Even for those familiar with the history of African linguistics, there is a richness and depth of analysis that provides both surprises and insights. A lively style and a fondness and respect for Africa and its workers—Africans and Europeans alike—make the book a pleasure to read.

Ch. 1 treats the earliest work and presents much new information. One learns of important links to the Caribbean and the work on African languages carried on there. The fascinating story of républicain Jean Dard is another surprise: he learned Wolof in Senegal after a shipwreck, wrote a grammar and dictionary, and then started a school.

Ch. 2 treats the period from 1850 on, with S. W. Koelle and Wilhelm Bleek being two prominent names. Koelle was in Freetown at the time of the return of slave ‘recaptives’ with their varied language backgrounds. In his Polyglotta Africana (1854), he presented ‘Comparative vocabulary of nearly three hundred words and phrases in more than 100 distinct African languages’ (the book’s subtitle). Bleek, in southern Africa, was ‘le véritable fondateur de la linguistique comparative bantoue’ (61). Another remarkable character from this period was the liberated Yoruba, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, who became ‘un des piliers de la linguistique de l’époque’. Interested in the Sierra Leone language Temne and later Yoruba, Crowther produced a number of significant works. Knowing from his own language the importance of tone, Crowther was the first, in an 1857 publication, to insist that tone be marked in the orthography.

The nineteenth century also featured the birth of the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ in the publications of Karl Friedrich Lepsius, developed later by Carl Meinhof. Lepsius attributed the more ‘advanced’ features of African languages to influences from Caucasian languages. Generally speaking, it turned into a race-based way of looking at languages, which was not fully discarded until the work of Joseph Greenberg in the mid-twentieth century. The work was also criticized for its reliance on evolutionarily graded typological criteria for classifying languages.

Ch. 3 treats classification issues in depth, taking as its starting point the beginning of Meinhof’s major publications in 1895 and covering the period up to Greenberg’s work in the 1950s. Meinhof’s ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ was a troublesome part of this period, but there was more productive work from that quarter: Meinhof’s discoveries of the famous l/t split in Bantu and the establishment of the vowel system of Proto-Bantu. Meinhof also produced dedicated students, including Diederich Westermann, whose oeuvre constitutes an important body of descriptive and classificatory work, on which Greenberg based many of his claims.

Ch. 4 evaluates individuals and schools of research after first looking at each major language family of Africa in terms of Greenberg’s classification. The schools include the British at London, the French structuralists powered by André Martinet, the Lolemi group at Tervuren (Belgium) and elsewhere, and the legacy of Meinhof in Germany. There is also the amazing Clement Martyn Doke and others in South Africa, operating somewhat independently. What is helpful in this chapter, particularly to the student, is the critical evaluation of both methodology and underlying assumptions.

Ch. 5 contains a provocative explanation for why African languages haven’t been studied more and why their study has vacillated in importance. The explanation lies in part in the institution of slavery, and in part in colonization and its ideological legacy.