Since Greenberg (1963, enormous work has been achieved in classifying, in reconstructing the genetic of African languages. In this process there was a need to assign names or labels to either the “discovered” languages or language families or affiliations. Unfortunately, the names were inherited from former linguists of the 18th/19th centuries. Contrary to European language, the criteria of one language and one country was not applied. Remember that France has French, Germany has German, England has English, Norway has Norwegian, China has Chinese and so on. I omit the long discussion on the challenges and wars involved of these denominations with relation to the issue of language and identity. In contrast, In Africa the names of the languages families were accidentally taken from rivers ( Volta, Congo, Niger). The names of languages incurred similar processes or were taken from pejorative exonyms or from neighboring denomination. Since the independence of African states, with the growing existence of linguistic scholars working on their mother tongue, there is an emergent need to revise this nomenclature especially if they involve negative connotations. But this doesn't go without difficulties because of the standardization of these odd and sometimes arbitrary names and the heavy administrative consequences. Ethnologue has attempted to solve these problems by using numeric ISO-names. The hypothesis is that endonyms will be the most relevant direction.

Prof Firmin Ahoua is a full professor of linguistics at the University Felix-Houphouet Boigny (FHB) since 2010 and is Immediate Past President of the West African Linguistics Association (WALS). He has expertise on Ivorian languages, prosodic phonology and language documentation and language. He has published numerous books and articles on African languages and is now the co-editor of African languages grammars and dictionaries at Language Science Press. He has also supervised more than 20 doctoral students.

We are looking forward to welcoming you to this event!

Chair: Adams Bodomo

Wednesday, 24. July 2024, 9:30 pm
Department of African Studies – Seminar room 4
University Campus,  Court  5.1., Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Vienna
afrika@univie.ac.at,  http://afrika.univie.ac.at