Grammatical Properties of African Languages
by Goh Yii Sheng (Malaysia)
Preamble
This article is dedicated to spreading awareness and providing information about African languages. Each language family is formatted in bold,branches (subfamilies) are in italics, traits of languages are in red, and the languages are underlined.
Genealogical linguistics:
This section is dedicated to utilising geographical areas (or families) in the African continent as a proxy to classify enormous language groups.
We start from the ancient African language families, along the Southern half.
Niger-Congo family: the largest
Along the Gulf of Guinea, east to Kenya and all the way down to South Africa, this entire landscape consists of the Niger-Congofamily: it contains about 1/5th of the world's languages!
Benue-Congo: the suffix heavy
The Niger-Congofamily finds the expansive Bantu branch of languages, with its unique quirk of sorting nouns into classes by using suffixes. Even the name "Bantu" is a superposition of "Ba" (meaning humans) and "ntu" (meaning some.)
Nilo-Saharan: the widely spoken
The Nilo-Saharanfamily is found within the heart of Africa. Languages in this category, such as Luo, Kanuri, and Songhay are spoken by MILLIONS of people.
Kadu: the intonation-dependent
Kadu languages may sound Kordofanian, a language belonging to the Niger-Congofamily, but its speakers are mostly situated in Sudan. It relies exclusively on tonality for sentences to be understandable.
Moving on to the North and Eastern continents:
Afroasiatic family
This family houses Ethiopian languages such as Egyptian, Semitic, and languages around the Omo River known for being unique and indistinguishable amongst themselves. Hausa, originating from Chadic languages, also marks grammar with specific tones.
Malagasy: expanding INWARD
The Malagasy language has elements of a single branch of the Austronesian family, as well as having been inspired by Borneo and Bantu words. Consider Malagasy a culmination of most of these languages, but do not be mistaken — it is still a developed language on its own!
Khoe-san family: the click consonant family
Now looking at the Kalahari Basin, which lies in the Southern edge of Africa:
Grouping with Hadza and Sandawe gives us the Khoe-sanlanguage family, known for their click consonant sounds (akin to "tsk", the sound we make when irritated)
This also influenced the neighbouring Sesotho and Zulu (both being Bantu languages) to include click consonants as well.
Areal linguistics
This section is dedicated to briefing about a different approach of understanding languages not based on their families, but their neighbouring regions.
Are You Really Khoe-san?
Revisiting the Khoe-sanfamily sees the Khoe, Kx'a, and Tuu (known for having the most clicks) languages. Considering how far Hadza and Sandawe are from the Southern margin of Africa, it may be plausible to assume that they actually barely have any connection at all, despite falling under the same family of Khoe-san.
Distant relatives: Are they even related?
The Nilo-Saharan family generalisation also faced scrutiny for being far too hypothetical. Languages like Chabu are clear isolates from the family, and Songhaifalls under the gray area of "can I call Songhai a family on its own, or a part of Nilo-Saharan?". However, refusing the larger generalisation leads to classifying too many small families.
Conclusion
The study of African languages is fascinating in the sense that each of the millions of languages is as unique as the other. Therefore, I urge you to think twice when calling a language just “African” — be specific and research more on one particular language. Let us work hard to prevent these precious languages from going extinct!
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