2008年度第9回AA研フォーラム

Abstract： For roughly half a century, work on the reconstruction of African languages and their interrelationship has been based on the work of Joseph Greenberg (1963). What this work has established in particular are findings such as the following: (a) The most easily accessible way of describing the historical relationship of these languages is by reconstructing their genetic relationship patterns. (b) The multitude of African languages can be reduced to four genetically defined units, called families by Greenberg and phyla by others. These units are Niger-Congo (or Niger-Kordofanian), Nilo-Saharan, Afroasiatic, and Khoisan. More recent research suggests that the typology of African languages appears to be strongly shaped by language contact and areal diffusion (Heine and Nurse 2008), and in the present talk it is argued that it is possible to both distinguish significant areas within Africa and define the African continent as a unit of linguistic geography.