Small and endangered languages of Africa
a bibliographical survey
Participants Jouni Filip Maho, Bonny Sands
The purpose of the present project is to survey the linguistic literature for small and/or endangered languages in Africa, in the hope of drawing focus on the many lacunae in the description of African languages.
There are about 1.500 languages in Africa. There may be more. A small number of these languages are fairly well-described and a relatively sizeable bulk of literature exist on and in them (see, for instance, the various webresources available for African languages). To this group, we may count such well-known African languages as Swahili, Hausa, Zulu, and others.
The large majority of African languages, however, are poorly described, if at all, and there is virtually no written literature at all written either in them or about them.
An estimated 70% of Africa's languages are spoken by speech communities sizing 100.000 people or less. Almost a quarter of all African languages are spoken by communities sizing 5.000 people or less. That's roughly 400 languages.
Trying to identify endangered languages is not as easy as it may seem. A language being spoken by few people does not by necessity make it an endangered one. There are no clear-cut criteria for determining language endangerment. There is however a growing body of literature and academic expertise in this area.
Still, we have to choose a language sample somehow, and so we have decided on the following (preliminary) criteria:
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(1) |
Languages listed by Gabi Sommer in "A survey on language death in Africa", an article appearing in Language death: factual and theoretical explorations with special reference to East Africa (ed. Matthias Brenzinger), publ. by Mouton de Gruyter, 1992.
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(2) |
Languages characterised as "nearly extinct" by SIL's Ethnologue, 14th edition.
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(3) |
Languages spoken by 2.000 people or less.
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(4) |
Languages spoken by people with, what might be called, "vulnerable life styles", such as eg. hunter-gatherers
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These criteria yield a list of approximately 300 languages; a number that may change as we go along. For instance, if we raise the statistical criteria from 2.000 to 5.000, the number of languages increase to anywhere between 400 and 500.
It should be noted that the statistical criterion is very crude. It only applies to languages for which we have statistical data/estimates. Many African languages are know only by name, with no estimates as to speaker statistics.
The preparatory work for the bibliography is planned to proceed during 2003, with a preliminary publication date set sometime in 2004 -- if all goes well.
