Time: Wednesday 10 December 2025 @ 11:30
Venue: Aula, Collegium Heliodori Święcicki, Grunwaldzka 6
Speaker: Prof. Tom Güldemann (Humboldt University, Berlin)
A revised assessment of linguistic diversity in Africa and some implications
Abstract
For almost 60 years, the linguistic diversity in Africa has been evaluated with almost exclusive reference to Greenberg’s (1963) continental genealogical classification. However, his assessment is increasingly viewed to be “badly in need of major reinvestigation and reworking” (Campbell and Poser 2008: 128). I have outlined in Güldemann (2018) a new approach to classifying African languages, not only by providing a very different perspective on currently robust genealogical relationships but also by assessing large-scale areal linguistic configurations. In the talk I discuss some implications of the far more diverse and internally structured linguistic landscape of Africa for research involving the continent’s languages, notably regarding language sampling and priority documentation.
References
- Campbell, Lyle and William J. Poser. 2008. Language classification: History and method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. The languages of Africa. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University.
- Güldemann, Tom (ed.). 2018. The languages and linguistics of Africa. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
About the speaker
Tom Güldemann received his doctoral and postdoctoral training at the Universities of Leipzig and Cologne. He is currently Professor for African linguistics and sociolinguistics at the Humboldt University Berlin. He works in the fields of linguistic typology, language documentation, grammatical change, and both genealogical and areal linguistics including its interface with non-linguistic disciplines for the reconstruction of early population history. In the field of typology, he has worked in particular on verbal systems, clause linkage, reported discourse, pronouns, and information structure. In terms of languages, he has a strong interest in the Bantu family, having produced in particular a major comparative study on Bantu verb morphology (Güldemann 1996). He also specializes in the documentation and description of so-called “Khoisan” languages with field and archival work on both living and extinct languages such as Taa, Nǁng, and ǀXam of the Tuu family and ǃOra and Kwadi of the Khoe-Kwadi family. Based on this and other comparative research he addressed the historical relationships among these languages against the complex precolonial history of southern Africa, notably as the leader of a large multidisciplinary project funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF) (cf. Güldemann and Fehn 2014). More recently, he edited a survey of African linguistics that includes his two major studies on genealogical and areal language relationships of the continent (Güldemann 2018).
About the lecture series
WA Distinguished Professors’ Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with the faculty and students.