African Voices: An Introduction to the Languages and Linguistics of Africa (review)

African Voices (AV) is an attempt to fill a textbook gap. Webb and Kembo-Sure articulate two goals: ‘to introduce students [in Africa (HFWS)] to theoretical linguistics… and to introduce them to the languages and linguistics of Africa…’ (x). Although AV contains several very good chapters, the book falls short of both goals: the first, by error-ridden presentation and poor pedagogy; the second, by addressing almost exclusively eastern and southern Africa.

AV comprises twelve chapters: Ch. 1, ‘Language as a problem in Africa’ (1–25), and Ch. 2, ‘The languages of Africa’ (26–54) (W & K-S); Ch. 3, ‘Linguistics: An overview’ (55–87) (KS & W); Ch. 4, ‘Languages in contact’ (88–108) (Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu); Ch. 5, ‘Languages in competition’ (109–32) (K-S & W); Ch. 6, ‘The sounds of Africa: Their phonetic characteristics’ (133–59), and Ch. 7, ‘System in the sounds of Africa’ (160–96) (Herman Batibo); Ch. 8, ‘Building techniques in African languages’ (197–219) (D. Okoth Okombo); Ch. 9, ‘The lexicons of Africa’ (220–44) (Danie Prinsloo, Albina R. Chuwa, and Elsabé Taljard); Ch. 10, ‘Discourse: Language in context’ (245–67) (Hilton Hubbard); Ch. 11, ‘Cross-cultural communication in Africa’ (268–85) (Oswald K. Ndoleriire); Ch. 12, ‘Language in education and language in learning in Africa’ (286–311) (Jane Kembo); an appendix, ‘A bird’s-eye view of the language character of the African states’ (312–22) (W & K-S); and an index. Each chapter includes expected learning outcomes, exercises, and a selected bibliography.

In Ch. 1, examining standardization, underdeveloped technical vocabularies, and negative sociolinguistic attitudes, W & K-S are persuasive that access to knowledge and skills, workplace productivity, political participation, and social alienation all have significant language-based causes. However, the dominance of English in eastern and southern Africa leads them to ignore the somewhat different but equally complex problems of nations where French or Arabic are dominant. Also, the authors ignore significant corpus planning efforts in such nations as Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Somalia, and Tanzania (Wolff 2000).

Ch. 2 is among the weakest chapters. Important issues growing out of the different colonial language policies for English, French, and Portuguese are relegated to an endnote (53). In addressing genetic classification, however, W & K-S get basic facts wrong. The authors define linguistic relatedness as lexical and structural similarity (30) and provide the sentence My pen is in my hand, which happens to have the same spelling in Afrikaans and English, as evidence that the two languages belong to the same language family (31). In presenting language classification, W & K-S claim that the Afro-Asiatic languages ‘were introduced into Africa in the seventh century, after the Islamic invasions’ (31); confuse the question of whether Khoi and San are genetically related with their ethnological differences as hunter-gatherers vs. nomadic cattle-herders (33); and divide Niger-Congo into Niger-Congo A and Niger-Congo B, identifying the latter as Bantu, including Yoruba and Igbo, ignoring Bendor-Samuel 1989 and Grimes & Grimes 2000. In their discussion of colonial languages, they ignore the place of Arabic, which predates the European languages in Africa by centuries. The chapter ends with a useful discussion of national sociolinguistic profiling and provides fifteen sample profiles. Even here, though, there are significant errors of detail: Fulani is classified as Bantu (47), Fulani and Fulfulde are incorrectly distinguished (47), Classical Arabic is not distinguished from modern dialects (47), and the official languages of Nigeria are limited to English, Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo (49), ignoring five others (Grimes & Grimes 2000).

Ch. 3 presents fundamental linguistic assumptions about structure, arbitrariness, universals, innateness, and a brief survey of branches of the field. The treatment of dialect questions using data from ChiBemba and Lamba illustrates lucidly the difficulty of determining dialect status.

Ch...