A Linguistic Geography of Africa (review)

A Linguistic Geography of Africa, despite its reader-friendly title, is a highly technical book aimed at professional linguists. It has global implications for the linguistic subfields of areal linguistics and, less directly, language universals, and it well deserves the attention of linguists of other regions of the world and not just specialists on Africa. But for the nonlinguist reader actually interested in the language geography of Africa and in learning about African languages in all their variety, Heine and Nurse's other edited volume, African Languages: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2000), is by far the better option; written for a wide audience, it comprehensively covers the whole sweep of language issues in Africa.

Three chapters present the essential content of this new book. For nonlinguists the most useful chapter is the second, Bernd Heine and Zelealem Leyew's "Is Africa a Linguistic Area?" which surveys the significant issues in the book and does so in a relatively accessible fashion. Chapters 3 and 4—"Africa as a Phonological Area" by Nick Clements and Annie Rialland and "Africa as a Morphosyntactic Area" by Denis Creissels et al.—have pan-African scope and by themselves fulfill the primary aims of the book as set out in chapters 2 and 3. The one startling gap in Clements and Rialland's otherwise full and careful presentation of African phonological characteristics is their lack of any deep engagement with the several major existing African historical linguistic reconstructions, despite the importance of those works for distinguishing areal features from ancient common inheritance. Creissels et al. present a marvelously full survey of the range of morphological and syntactical features found across the continent, along with judicious proposals as to which features might be particularly African within the wider world linguistic context. However, the chapter is densely written and requires fluency in the technical lexicon of morphosyntactical studies.

The next several chapters are of mixed quality. Tom Güldemann's contribution, "The Macro-Sudan Belt," is diffuse in scope. It offers broad conjectures about areal spread of linguistic features versus common inheritance, but without generating focused, testable hypotheses that might give substance to these speculations. In contrast, Roland Kiessling, Maarten Mous, and Derek Nurse in chapter 7, "The Tanzanian Rift Valley Area," offer a model approach to distinguishing areal versus genetic sources of common features across a geographical span of languages in north-central Tanzania. Throughout they take into account the genetic relationships and linguistic histories of the speech communities involved, and in doing so provide a comprehensive foundation for distinguishing which linguistic features actually spread cross-linguistically and therefore define this region as a linguistic area. Joachim Crass and Ronny Meyer in chapter 7 revisit an older view, that the whole Ethiopian highlands form a linguistic area. Their inventory of common features supports not really a pan-Highlands area, but rather an Ethiopian Rift Valley linguistic area. The availability of established linguistic historical reconstructions makes this a prime region for applying the model of Kiessling et al. to generate systematic and comprehensive results, but Crass and Meyer pass up that opportunity. Christa König in chapter 8, although giving an important role to areal factors, does take due account of genetic language relationships in her explanation of the distributions of one particularly African kind of case marking, marked nominative, almost entirely limited to languages of two African phyla, Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan.

Gerritt Dimmendaal brings the book to a suitable close in his chapter, "Africa's Verb-Final Languages," with a venture into the realms of language universals. In this he refutes standard presumptions about syntactic ordering in verb-final languages. But more important, he constructs a nuanced, revised understanding of how pragmatic and historical factors reshape those presumptions.

To sum up, for linguists this book contains much that is valuable and useful; for most readers of the African Studies Review, not so much.