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6 - African languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Moira Yip
Affiliation:
University College London
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Summary

Classification

The languages of Africa display an astonishing variety of complex tone systems, and a correspondingly large body of literature has grown up in an attempt to understand them. Together with East Asia, Africa has probably the highest ratio of tonal to non-tonal languages, with tonal languages found in just about every language family with the exception of Semitic and Berber. In particular, the Niger-Congo family, which subsumes most of the sub-Saharan languages, including the Bantu group, is almost entirely tonal (or occasionally accentual). Table 6.1, based largely on Bendor-Samuel 1989, shows the affiliation of the major tonal languages of Africa, including all those discussed in this chapter.

Common or striking characteristics of African tone languages

By most estimates Africa contains well over a thousand languages, with the Niger-Congo group alone having more than 900; among the Bantu languages, at least fifteen are spoken by more than three million people, and at least six are spoken by more than five million. As one might expect in such a huge group of languages covering such an enormous geographical area, there is great diversity in their tonal systems. Nonetheless, one can identify some characteristics that are particularly widespread in Africa, and much less common in Asia or Central America, which we shall look at in later chapters.

The theoretical literature on tone has been dominated by studies of African languages, and as a result an understanding of African systems is a foundation for a study of other areas from a theoretical perspective.

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Chapter
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Tone , pp. 130 - 170
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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  • African languages
  • Moira Yip, University College London
  • Book: Tone
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139164559.011
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  • African languages
  • Moira Yip, University College London
  • Book: Tone
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139164559.011
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • African languages
  • Moira Yip, University College London
  • Book: Tone
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139164559.011
Available formats
×