The Languages of Africa is a 1963 book of essays by the linguist
Joseph Greenberg, in which the author sets forth a genetic
classification of
African languages that, with some changes, continues to be the most commonly used one today. It is an expanded and extensively revised version of his 1955 work Studies in African Linguistic Classification, which was itself a compilation of eight articles which Greenberg had published in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology between 1949 and 1954. It was first published in 1963 as Part II of the International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 29, No. 1; however, its second edition of 1966, in which it was published (by
Indiana University, Bloomington: Mouton & Co., The Hague) as an independent work, is more commonly cited.[citation needed]
Its author describes it as based on three fundamentals of method:
"The sole relevance in comparison of resemblances involving both sound and meaning in specific forms."[page needed]
Semitic,
Berber,
Egyptian and
Cushitic had been generally accepted as members of a "Hamito-Semitic" family, while
Chadic,
Fulani, "
Nilo-Hamitic" and
Hottentot had all been controversially proposed as members. He accepted Chadic (while changing its membership), and rejected the other three, establishing to most linguists' satisfaction that they had been classified as "Hamitic" for purely typological reasons. This demonstration also led to the rejection (by him and by linguistics as a whole) of the term
Hamitic as having no coherent meaning in historical linguistics; as a result, he renamed the newly reclassified family "
Afroasiatic".
Following Schapera and rejecting Meinhof, he classified Hottentot as a member of the
Central Khoisan languages. To Khoisan he also added the much more northerly
Hadza (Hatsa) and
Sandawe.
His most revolutionary step was the postulation of the
Nilo-Saharan family. This is still controversial, because so far attempts to reconstruct this family have been unsuccessful, but it holds promise and is it widely used. Prior linguists had noticed an apparent relationship between the majority of the languages, but had never formally proposed a family. These languages – the
Eastern Sudanic,
Central Sudanic,
Kunama and
Berta branches – Greenberg placed into a core group he called
Chari–Nile, to which he added all the remaining unclassified languages of Africa that did not have noun classes. The distinction between Chari–Nile and the peripheral branches has since been abandoned. On a lower level, he placed "Nilo-Hamitic" firmly within
Nilotic, following a suggestion of Köhler, and placed Eastern Sudanic on a firmer foundation.
Finally, he assigned the unclassified
languages of the Nuba Hills of
Kordofan to the Niger–Congo family, calling the result Congo–Kordofanian. The relationship has been accepted, with the exception of the "
Tumtum" group, though the
Kordofanian languages are no longer seen as being a primary branch, and the name 'Congo–Kordofanian' is no longer used.
Greenberg's four families became the dominant conception of African languages, though his subclassification did not fare as well. Niger−Congo and Afroasiatic are nearly universally accepted, with no significant support for Hamitic or the independence of Bantu. Nilo-Saharan is still considered provisional. Khoisan is now rejected by specialists, except as a term of convenience, though it may be retained in less specialized literature.
Classification
The book classifies Africa's languages into four stocks not presumed to be related to each other, as follows: