African languages and phonological theory (original) (raw)

I've been asked to write about the mutual influence of African languages and phonological theory, specifically addressing two questions: What and how have African language contributed to phonological theory? What and how have linguistic theories contributed to the understanding African phonology? To treat these questions properly would be a major undertaking, first, because of the large number of African languages, and, second, because of their considerable diversity. To cite Greenberg's (1963) influentual classification, the roughly 2000 languages of Africa fall into four major linguistic phyla: Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan (see Heine & Nurse 2000 for a more recent overview of African languages and their classification). Except for the click consonants of the last family (which spill over into some neighboring Bantu languages that have "borrowed" them), the phonological phenomena found in African languages are duplicated elsewhere on the gl...