Africa's endangered languages: Documentary and theoretical approaches eds. by Jason Kandybowicz and Harold Torrence (review)

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 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...