Introduction

The aim of the present chapter is to review a list of morphosyntactic features, involving categories and their syntactic functions, which are likely to provide a typological characterization of languages in general. The properties in question are investigated from the following two points of view:

1. Does the proportion of African languages possessing a given feature (or being devoid of it) seem to be roughly similar to the proportion observed at world level, or to be significantly different?

2. Are the features whose frequency or rarity characterizes Africa as a whole evenly distributed, or are there geographical clusterings, i.e. areas with a particular concentration of languages possessing or lacking the features in question, and if so, to what degree do such clusterings coincide with or diverge from genetic groupings?

We do not proceed by systematically testing the features we consider on the basis of a language sample pre-established on the basis of statistical methods that would ensure its representativity. Apart from a few reference works whose quality can be taken for granted, this chapter mainly relies on the authors' first-hand knowledge of African data. This undoubtedly limits the bearing of our conclusions (or rather suggestions), but the set of African languages documented in a sufficient way to be systematically used in such a study is so limited that it is simply impossible to extract from it a sample representative of the diversity of African languages.

The verb-final type in a crosslinguistic perspective

The position of the verb relative to other constituents within a clause has been claimed by a number of authors to be a predictor of an additional set of syntactic features. Thus, according to Greenberg (1966), verb-initial languages tend to be prepositional rather than postpositional, putting inflected auxiliary verbs before rather than after the main verb; with more than chance frequency, verb-final languages tend to use postpositions, with auxiliary verbs following the main verb. Such inductively based generalizations about the nature of language of course require further analyses and explanations, e.g. in terms of preferred parsing or processing structures for the human mind.

In more recent correlative studies of this type, e.g. by Dryer (1992), a distinction is drawn between phrasal and non-phrasal elements. Whereas phrasal elements, such as subject and object phrases or adpositions appear to follow a more consistent right-branching or left-branching pattern crosslinguistically, the position of non-phrasal categories such as adjectives, demonstratives, negative particles, or tense–aspect markers does not seem to correlate with constituent order type, as argued by Dryer.

Obviously, constituent order is but one of various factors determining the typological portrait of a language, morphological techniques used in expressing syntactic and semantic relations being another important parameter. This latter observation of course is not new; Sapir (1921:120–46) already pointed out that languages may differ considerably in the techniques used for the expression of syntactic relations.

When linguistic research takes place in the natural setting where the language under investigation is spoken rather than at a desk in an air-conditioned office at one's home university, this has consequences for the endeavor. In the field, one becomes part of a social network in the speech community under investigation, and thus this type of research necessarily involves as much personal and social effort as it does linguistic “brain work.”

Descriptive linguistics appears to have more standard ways of working with informants than, say, ethnography does. In current anthropology, skepticism about the ethnographer's ability to understand and convey (what are assumed to be) subjective experiences encountered in the field seems to dominate the discussion. In empirical linguistic research, one may also run into epistemological problems, some of which the linguistic fieldworker – and the theoretical linguist consulting descriptive sources – can ill afford to ignore. The interpretation of most linguistic signs requires a context in time and space. Researchers have to try and find out whether variation in speech between informants they consult are the result of elicitation techniques or whether they truly reflect linguistically interesting variables in the data. Formalizing linguistic field methods is possible only to a certain extent. The rest depends on the serendipity of the individual linguist and elusive insights that no clearly defined eliciting procedure seems to be able to insure. Below, I present some practical guidelines for the basic investigation of (relatively) undescribed languages that is to be carried out in conjunction with native-speaker informants.

Introduction

Eastern Africa does not constitute a unit linguistically or culturally. Instead, this area, roughly comprising the countries of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda, is characterized by a large variety of language families and groups on the one hand, and a considerable degree of cultural diversity on the other. In one sense the present geographical delimitation for the discussion of language obsolescence is therefore arbitrary. Such a regional approach, however, allows for a comparison of different circumstances relevant to the actuation problem of dying languages. One such variable concerns the social and economic structure of interacting groups, whilst a further variable relates to demographic factors.

The present contribution is directed towards disseminating general information on the causes and effects of language shift. It is not a survey of all known cases of language contraction and death in eastern Africa. Instances of partial and complete language shift are so numerous that it can be stated without exaggeration that most ethnic groups in this part of Africa, and probably elsewhere, are the result of an amalgamation of various groups which were distinct at an earlier stage. More specifically, this paper tries to provide answers, at least in part, to the following questions:

1. To what extent, and in what ways, do economic and social factors play a role as causal mechanisms in the gradual “default assignment” of certain languages?

2. How important is language as a potential symbol of ethnic identity relative to other symbols?

3. What kind of traces, linguistically or otherwise, does language shift leave behind, once the extinction of a particular language has become a fact?