Polyglotta Africana is a study published in 1854 by the German missionary Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle (1823–1902), in which the author compares 280 words from 200 African languages and dialects (or about 120 separate languages according to today's classification; several varieties considered distinct by Koelle were later shown to belong to the same language). As a comparative study it was a major breakthrough at the time.
Koelle based his material on first-hand observations, mostly with freed slaves in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He transcribed the data using a uniform phonetic script. Koelle's transcriptions were not always accurate; for example, he persistently confused [s] with [z] and [tʃ] with [dʒ]. His data were consistent enough, however, to enable groupings of languages based on vocabulary resemblances. Notably, the groups which he set up correspond in a number of cases to modern groups:
North-West Atlantic — Atlantic
North-Western High Sudan/Mandenga — Mande
North-Eastern High Sudan — Gur
Although Koelle's was not the first such study comparing different African languages,[1] (for example, a missionary called John Clarke had produced a similar work in 1848,[2] and still earlier Hannah Kilham had produced her Specimens of African Languages, Spoken in the Colony of Sierra Leone in 1828), yet in its accuracy and thoroughness it outclassed all the others and still proves useful today.
^Hair (1966a)
^Clarke (1848/9); cf. Hair (1966b).
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