This book gathers together eighteen scholars from history, archaeology, religion, linguistics, political science, and philosophy who do not usually have the opportunity to engage in dialogue with each other. By doing so it can be read as a handbook on how different disciplines deal with issues of language change and movement, both theoretically and methodologically. Sometimes they aim at maximizing accuracy, or else they attempt to achieve generalization, which necessarily involves simplification. The contributors do not always have a common understanding of what the units of analysis are, what kind of evidence should be considered, and even about the meaning of language. As a bounded single entity, language is examined as an independent variable affecting other outcomes, but also as the dependent one, a product of history and choice, structure and agency, colonization and decolonization. According to the authors, the reasons for language movement are often related to power. In Africa they comprise, among other factors, nomadism, long-distance trade, war, exile, and the slave trade. More recently, the African linguistic landscapes have also been shaped by telecommunication and transportation technologies.
Other research questions tackle the role of languages as markers of different social identities, phraseology in particular contexts, the development of urban youth languages, and the evolution of genetic language families (e.g. Bantu). Several chapters deal with the interactions between indigenous vernaculars and European colonial languages, and problematize notions such as home language and mother tongue, majority and minority languages. They ask themselves what counts as a single language and as a cluster of related languages, to what extent indigeneity may be a matter of degree (e.g. Afrikaans, pidgins), and under what conditions does language contact evolve toward monolingualism or toward multilingualism, through adaptation and resilience, with a division of labour among different languages, usually including a lingua franca (e.g. Wolof).
It is not common that a collection of essays transcends its fragmented nature and becomes a synergic volume. This way, its comparative nature is emphasized from both diachronic and synchronic approaches, allowing us to observe and contrast across different disciplinary problems, time periods, and regions.
For Africanists, this book offers a number of insights into linguistic debates. For scholars with no particular interest in Africa, it is still relevant, as it challenges common assumptions and bridges several gaps between the social sciences and humanities. Indeed, interdisciplinary should always be the key word in works about such a complex and diverse continent, but also in every study concerning language policies, language identities, and language rights, too often limited by an ethnocentric approach. For example, to what extent can we talk about the principle of territoriality in realities where boundaries are porous, people's linguistic repertoire is in constant evolution, and most of them are multilingual, even if they do not speak ‘pure’ versions of any single language? Can we still use in our researches and theoretical frameworks clear-cut divisions among ethnolinguistic groups? Fortunately, the authors do not only raise such questions, but they also suggest some answers.
