The Oxford Handbook of African Languages

The Oxford Handbook of African Languages PDF

Roughly 6,000 languages are stated to exist on earth, practically one-third of them are situated on the African continent.

In line with a broadly accepted speculation, African languages might be categorised into 4 bigger genetic models (so-called phyla); these have been labeled Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan.

Niger-Congo represents the most important, Khoisan the smallest unit.

All phyla subdivide right into a quantity of language households.

Nevertheless, a great quantity of African languages current themselves as hardly classifiable and are, due to this fact, thought-about unaffiliated in the interim.
A number of – kind of profitable – makes an attempt have been made to reconstruct the histories of African language phyla.

There have additionally been ventures to ascertain genetic hyperlinks between language phyla, similar to Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan, however the outcomes weren’t overwhelmingly convincing.

For certain, essentially the most promising historic reconstructions had been attained on the language household and/or subgroup degree.
This quantity is a reference guide, offering a set of descriptive, typological, historico-comparative, sociolinguistic, and different analytical statements about African languages.

It’s meant to satisfy the curiosity of totally different populations of readers, particularly college students, Africanist in addition to common linguists, but in addition non-linguistic students specializing in Africa.

A big quantity of the information offered within the guide is drawn from the authors’ personal discipline expertise and collections assembled during the last thirty years roughly.