In African formal education systems, the Latin script dominates, with the exception of Arabic-writing North Africa and the Horn of Africa, writing in Ge’ez. In secular state schools, literacy is mainly taught in the ex-colonial languages, which all use Latin-based orthographies. But even schools that teach so-called “national languages” – indigenous languages that are officially […]
For researchers looking at transatlantic entanglements, and for traces that link slaves in the Americas to their places of origin, names – for rituals, objects, foods – provide important clues. I have described in earlier posts how the presence of Upper Guineans in Peru and Northeastern Brazil is tangible in family names and names for […]
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, […]
Thursday is noun class day in my developing routine to post on African indigenous languages throughout the year. I mentioned in my first post on noun classes last week that in many Atlantic languages, nouns are not assigned a gender, but rather, nouns are created from semantically general roots through the combination with multiple noun […]
Thursday is noun class day in my developing routine to post on African indigenous languages throughout the year. I mentioned in my first post on noun classes last week that in many Atlantic languages, nouns are not assigned a gender, but rather, nouns are created from semantically general roots through the combination with multiple noun […]
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 […]
I have a good excuse for having stayed away from the blog for some time: I was busy getting ready for the 8th European Conference on African Studies which took place at the University of Edinburgh last week. This was my first ECAS, and with 1,500 participants and hundreds of panels, it was almost overwhelming. […]
Distinctions that are socially meaningful tend to be reflected in grammar. The huge importance accorded to age differences is hard-wired into lexical distinctions in many West African languages. In Bamanan (Bambara), siblings are differentiated primarily regarding age, and only secondarily according to gender: older siblings are designated kɔrɔ, younger ones dɔgɔ. The modifiers muso `woman’ […]
One of the nicest side effects of having this blog is that it creates a dialogue with readers, who point out things that are beyond the scope of my expertise and regional interest (and also, capacity, given the sheer number and exuberant diversity of African languages!). When I wrote my first post on taboo words, […]
The language-based outlook of linguistics means that often, we capture only the reality of one language. But sometimes, as soon as one starts looking across language boundaries, stories of shared cultural practices, and in this case, fears, emerge. I had such an experience when, inspired by research on Casamance Creole by Noël Bernard Biagui, Joseph […]
Last week, I had the chance to visit an exhibition on David Adjaye, the British-Ghanaian architect whose work resonates with themes of identity, memory and belonging. Many of his buildings, such as the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC pay homage to the visual language of African arts, crafts […]
Happy European day of languages everyone! Where I live now, in Finland, languages are taken very seriously. But even in a country that sees itself as multilingual, not all languages have equal status. Many languages have been minoritised, that is, they have been given lesser status in a nation state based on regulated domains for […]