This article is about the book. For an overview of African languages, see Languages of Africa.
The Languages of Africa
Cover of the first edition
Author
Joseph Greenberg
Country
United States
Language
English
Subject
Languages of Africa
Published
1963
Media type
Print
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]
"Mass comparison as against isolated comparisons between pairs of languages."[page needed]
"Only linguistic evidence is relevant in drawing conclusions about classification."[page needed]
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