An Introduction to African Linguistics (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- An introduction to African linguistics by Ngessimo N. Mutaka
Mutaka and Tamanji’s Introduction to African linguistics, according to its preface, ‘deals with the main features of languages as found mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, and more particularly in Bantu languages’ (ix).
Ch. 1 (1–32) compares typological, genealogical, and areal classifications of African languages and gives a list of Bantu languages classified by ‘zones’.
Chs. 2 (33–53), 3 (54–84), and 4 (85–105) present sound systems and phonological processes found in African (mostly Bantu) languages. Ch. 5 (106–49) offers a large number of exercises on the processes introduced in the preceding chapters. These four chapters constitute a major part of the book.
Ch. 6 (150–91) discusses noun class systems and different elements of the verb in Bantu languages, including so-called ‘verbal extensions’, that is, suffixes added to the verb root which code ‘causative’, ‘applicative’, ‘passive’, and a number of other semantic notions.
Ch. 7 (192–243) defines syntactic categories found in African languages and introduces notational conventions of transformational grammar, applying them to some African languages. It also touches on serial verb constructions, which are shown to code different functions in African languages, including manner, direction, and comparison.
Ch. 8 (244–64) deals mostly with the application of the comparative method to Bantu languages and some phonological changes that have been reconstructed for this language group.
In Ch. 9 (265–78) M defines the terms ‘trade language’, ‘pidgin’, and ‘creole’ and discusses as a case study whether Cameroonian Pidgin English should be treated as a pidgin or creole language.
Ch. 10 (279–302) deals mostly with lexical expansion in African languages and briefly mentions glotto-chronology, dialectometry, and linguistic geography.
One might criticize the book on the grounds that it is too narrowly focused on Bantu languages and offers only little information on other African language families. On the other hand, as the book seems to have developed out of the authors’ wish to create a course book for their students at the University of Yaoundé, Cameroon, it is understandable that many of the examples were taken from languages known to or spoken by these students. [End Page 184]
The exercises in various parts of the book are difficult to solve without some previous knowledge of African languages, and many of them explicitly require it.
Despite these criticisms, the authors should be commended for their effort in writing this book, a valuable resource for students of African languages. However, a general linguistic audience may find African languages: An introduction (Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) more useful.
