As a new resident of Finland and keen learner of Finnish, I was delighted when a Finnish personal pronoun appeared on ads all across Europe. Plastered on tube tunnel walls and advertising boards in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Stockholm and Sydney, witty posters thanked European languages for their lexical gifts to the Finnish language […]

Happy Easter, dear readers! Whether you observe this Christian holiday or not, you may be interested in the regional entanglements and semantic changes of the Latin word pascha ‘Easter” as it travelled through the Mediterranean and beyond. With pronounced as [k] in Latin, the word bears resemblance to many words designating a major religious celebration, […]

Today’s post on African indigenous languages looks across the Atlantic at Diaspora groups created by African slaves in the Americas. One such group is the Bran diaspora that formed in Peru in the 16th and 17th century when slaves from the Upper Guinea Coast were numerous among the African slaves transported there. Brans were West […]

Languages are often boxed in in our thinking, with items belonging to one language, and with language being tacitly understood as spoken and written forms of expression only. Gesture and sign language research questions both these premises, by looking at how manual and bodily gestures are used in communication. Research on gesture, probably because it […]

Taboos are a popular topic among readers of this blog, for understandable reasons. They give insight into people’s beliefs, as in the case of night-time taboos that can be found all over Africa, including Mali and South Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Or they illustrate the rules that guide social interaction, as is often the […]

I mentioned noun classes, one of the most prominent features of many languages of the Niger-Congo language phylum, in previous posts. I also introduced Fula, a language of the Atlantic family whose speakers are found across Africa from the shores of the Atlantic to the Horn of Africa, and which has many different local varieties. […]

This blog had a long hiatus – I’ve been too busy adapting to life in Finland and learning one of its official languages, Finnish. It is not without irony that I take up this blog again at the end of a week celebrating the European day of languages. Two years ago at the same time, […]

Although they are not contained in most descriptive grammars, greetings are highly prominent in everyday interactions across West Africa. Much more than the mumbled answer ‘Not too bad, thanks’ to the question ‘How are you?’ or the two word sequences that are used in many European languages, greetings in West Africa are elaborate rituals that […]

On March 13, the great Ghanaian ethnomusicologist Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia died at the age of 97. His hugely influential body of work contains books and papers on an area very important for many African cultures, located at the meeting point of music and language: drumming. He worked extensively on drumming in several societies of […]

During my recent stay in Bamako, I had occasion to revive some of my rusty Bambara. Many exchanges happened at lunch time, and now, back in London, I’m rereading a classic article to strengthen my practice. In “De l’alimentation au Mali”, Gérard Dumestre lays out the ceremonial sequence of eating and the Bambara formulaic expressions […]