Premium
Africa's Linguistic Diversity
Author(s) -
Sands Bonny
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
language and linguistics compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.619
H-Index - 44
ISSN - 1749-818X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00124.x
Subject(s) - linguistic diversity , linguistics , diversity (politics) , languages of africa , endangered species , work (physics) , language family , geography , history , sociology , anthropology , philosophy , demography , engineering , mechanical engineering , population
African language classification in the latter half of the 20th century has been dominated by Joseph Greenberg's work classifying African languages into four linguistic genetic groupings: Afroasiatic, Niger‐Kordofanian, Nilo‐Saharan, and Khoisan. Current research indicates that there are a minimum of 20 unrelated African language families or isolates. Africa's linguistic diversity will remain poorly documented unless significant efforts are made to document some of the continent's most endangered, underdescribed languages and language families.