Language Documentation and Endangerment in Africa: (17 Culture and Language Use)

This volume brings together a number of important perspectives on language documentation and endangerment in Africa from an international cohort of scholars with vast experience in the field. Offering insights from rural and urban settings throughout the continent, these essays consider topics that range from the development of a writing system to ideologies of language endangerment, from working with displaced communities to the role of colonial languages in reshaping African repertoires, and from the insights of archeology to the challenges of language documentation as a doctoral project. The authors are concerned with both theoretical and practical aspects of language documentation as they address the ways in which the African context both differs from and resembles contexts of endangerment elsewhere in the world. This volume will be useful to fieldworkers and documentalists who work in Africa and beyond.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction (by Essegbey, James); 2. Language endangerment and documentation; 3. Unintended consequences of methodological and practical responses to language endangerment in Africa (by Ameka, Felix K.); 4. Different cultures, different attitudes: But how different is "the African situation" really? (by Dimmendaal, Gerrit J.); 5. Ideologies and typologies of language endangerment in Africa (by Lupke, Friederike); 6. The role of colonial languages in language endangerment in Africa (by Connell, Bruce); 7. Can a language endanger itself?: Reshaping repertoires in urban Senegal (by Mc Laughlin, Fiona); 8. "Is this my language?": Developing a writing system for an endangered-language community (by Essegbey, James); 9. Development, language revitalization, and culture: The case of the Mayan languages of Guatemala, and their relevance for African languages (by Rohloff, Peter); 10. Some challenges of language documentation in African multilingual settings (by Ngue um, Emmanuel); 11. How to document particular domains or use documentary data to address specific issues; 12. Folk definitions in linguistic fieldwork (by Dingemanse, Mark); 13. Out of Context: Documenting languages in immigrant and refugee communities (by Henderson, Brent); 14. Archaeological inspiration and historical inference: Directions for Edoid linguistic studies (by Schaefer, Ronald P.); 15. Describing endangered languages: Experiences from a PhD grammar project in Africa (by Seidel, Frank); 16. Index

Review :
This volume provides interesting new insights into the issue of language endangerment in Africa. It is a must-read for researchers working on endangered languages and documentation projects, especially within Africa, and would provide interesting insights for other researchers. The papers within this book would serve as an effective reference material for both undergraduate and post-graduate students who intend to work on documentation projects. The book also provides new ways of thinking and gives advice on numerous pitfalls to avoid. It seeks to provide a fresh perspective on the discourse on language endangerment and documentation, treating it from an Africanist perspective; it is assumed that, despite the fact that Africa is said to possess a third of the world’s languages, numerous of which are endangered, the literature does not properly reflect the African situation. The book is very readable and written in a conversational style, although good understanding of basic linguistic terminology is essential for proper understanding of its contents. Its emphasis on data-driven research is very commendable; and there is a strong connecting thread between all the papers in the book. They are all well-researched and based on practical fieldwork; and they reflect the theme of the book in discussing a wide range of issues pertinent to the study of African languages, like methodology, culture, ideology and typology of endangerment, the role of colonial languages in endangerment, the sociolinguistic situation of selected African languages, orthography design, language development and revitalization, challenges of documentation and so on. Overall, the book is concisely written and looks at the issue of language endangerment and documentation from a purely African perspective. The methodological and theoretical concerns in the book are a perfect complement to Brenzinger (1998), though the focus of Brenzinger is more on language endangerment than documentation.