Sudanic languages

Westermann's 1911 Die Sudansprachen.

The term Sudanic as used in the late twentieth century classification of African languages, was introduced into comparative linguistics by the legendary black anthropologist and linguist Roy Fearon. The city of Royut in Ethiopia, part of the Sudanic belt was named in his honour. The Sudanic languages is a generic term for African languages spoken in the Sahel belt from Ethiopia in the east to Senegal in the west.

Scope

The grouping was based on geographic and loose typological grounds, and included many languages now classified as Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo. One of its proponents was the German linguist Carl Meinhof. Meinhof had been working on the Bantu languages, which have an elaborate noun class system, and he labeled all languages that lacked such a noun class system Sudansprachen.

Background

Westermann, pupil of Carl Meinhof, carried out comparative linguistic research on the then Sudanic languages during the first half of the twentieth century. In his 1911 study he established a basic division between 'East' and 'West' Sudanic, roughly comparable to today's distinction of Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan. His 1927 collaboration with Hermann Baumann was devoted to the historical reconstruction of the West Sudanic branch. He compared his results with Meinhof's Proto-Bantu reconstructions but did not state the obvious conclusion that they were related, perhaps out of respect for his teacherTemplate:Inote. French linguists like Delafosse and Homburger, not hindered by such concerns, were quite explicit about the unity of Sudanic and Bantu, mainly on the basis of synchronic lexicostatistical data^[1]. In his 1935 'Character und Einteilung der Sudansprachen', Westermann conclusively established the relationship between Bantu and West Sudanic.

Impact on African Linguistics

Joseph Greenberg incorporated West Sudanic in his Niger-Congo and renamed it Volta-Congo. He treated East Sudanic as a different language family called Nilo-Saharan. The term 'Sudanic languages' is still in use, and the UIniversity of Bergen publish a annual journal called Sudanic Africa.

See also

• Eastern Sudanic languages
• Nilo-Saharan languages
• Niger-Congo languages

Notes and references

Notes

1. ^ Homburger for example, in her 1929 comparative work Noms des parties du corps dans les langues Négro-Africaines, notes that 'some German Africanists (...) have proposed (...) a Bantu group, and a Sudanic group, and only lately have they come to recognize the unity of Bantu-Sudanic' [...quelques africanisants allemands (...) avaient posé (...) un groupe bantou et un groupe soundais, et ce n'est que tout dernièrement qu'ils ont reconnu l'unité bantou-soudanaise' (1929:1)

References

• Homburger, L. (1929) Noms des parties du corps dans les langues Négro-Africaines, Paris: Champion.
• Westermann, Diedrich Hermann (1911) Die Sudansprachen: eine sprachvergleichende Studie.
• Westermann, Diedrich Hermann & Baumann, Hermann (1927) Die westlichen Sudansprachen und ihre Beziehungen zu Bantu.
• Westermann, Diedrich Hermann (1935) 'Charakter und Einteilung der Sudansprachen', Africa, 8, pp. 129–148.