The Bantu languages are in some sense remarkably uniform (SVO basic word order, noun classes, verbal morphology), but this extensive language family also show a wealth of morphosyntactic variation. Two core areas in which such variation is attested are subject and object agreement. The book explores the variation in Bantu subject and object marking on the basis of data from 75 Bantu languages, discovering striking patterns (the RANDOM and the AWSOM correlation), and providing a novel syntactic analysis. This analysis takes into account not just phi agreement, but also nominal licensing and information structure. A Person feature, associated with animacy, definiteness, or givenness, is shown to be responsible for differential object agreement, while at the same time accounting for doubling vs. non-doubling object marking – a hybrid solution to an age-old debate in Bantu comparative morphosyntax. It is furthermore proposed that low functional heads can Case-license flexibly downwards or upwards, depending on the relative topicality of the two arguments involved. This accounts for the properties of symmetric object marking in ditransitives (for Appl), and subject inversion constructions (for v). By keeping Agree constant and systematically determining which featural parameters are responsible for the attested variation, the proposed analysis argues for an emergentist view of features and parameters (following Biberauer 2018, 2019), and against both Strong Uniformity and Strong Modularity.

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Interrogates and explores African literature in African languages today, and the continuing interfaces between works in indigenous languages and those written in European languages or languages of colonizers. Sixty years after the Conference of African Writers of English Expression at Makerere University, the dominance in the global canon of African literatures written in European languages over those in indigenous languages continues to be an issue. This volume of re-examines this central question of African literatures to ask, What is the state of African literatures in African languages today? Contributors discuss the translation of Gurnah's novel Paradise to Swahili, and Osemwegies ;Ọrọ Epic;lt; to English, and Wolof wrestlers panegyrics. They analyse Edo eco-critical poetry, and the poetics of Igbo mask poetry, and morality in early prose fiction in indigenous Nigerian languages. Other essays contribute a semiotic analysis of Duruaku ;A Matter of Identity, and the decolonization of trauma in Uwem Akpan Say Youre One of Them. Overall, the volume paints a complex image of African cultural production in indigenous languages, especially in the ways Africas oral performance traditions remain resilient in the face of a seemingly undiminished presence of non-African language literary traditions.

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This collection presents new research on key topics in anthropological linguistics, with a focus on African languages. While Africanist linguists have long been concerned with sociocultural aspects of language structure and use, no comprehensive volume dedicated to the anthropological linguistics of Africa has yet been published. This volume seeks to fill this gap. The chapters address a broad range of topics in anthropological linguistics, including classic themes such as spatial reference, color, kin terms, and emotion, as well as emerging interests in the linguistic expression of personhood, sociality, and language ideology. All contributions are based on original empirical research and present insights into African language practices from a sociocultural perspective. The volume showcases research on dozens of African languages spoken across the continent, with particular emphasis on languages of East Africa. This book will be of interest to areal specialists as well as to anthropological linguists worldwide.

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The present volume is a pioneering collection of poetry by the outstanding Kenyan poet, intellectual and imam Ustadh Mahmmoud Mau (born 1952) from Lamu island, once an Indian Ocean hub, now on the edge of the nation state. By means of poetry in Arabic script, the poet raises his voice against social ills and injustices troubling his community on Lamu. The book situates Mahmoud Mau’s oeuvre within transoceanic exchanges of thoughts so characteristic of the Swahili coast. It shows how Swahili Indian Ocean intellectual history inhabits an individual biography and writings. Moreover, it also portrays a unique African Muslim thinker and his poetry in the local language, which has so often been neglected as major site for critical discourse in Islamic Africa. The selected poetry is clustered around the following themes: jamii: societal topical issues, ilimu: the importance of education, huruma: social roles and responsabilities, matukio: biographical events and maombi: supplications. Prefaced by Rayya Timamy (Nairobi University), the volume includes contributions by Jasmin Mahazi, Kai Kresse and Kadara Swaleh, Annachiara Raia and Clarissa Vierke. The authors’ approaches highlight the relevance of local epistemologies as archives for understanding the relationship between reform Islam and local communities in contemporary Africa.

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This book challenges the view that digital communication in Africa is limited and relatively unsophisticated and questions the assumption that digital communication has a damaging effect on indigenous African languages. The book applies the principles of Digital African Multilingualism (DAM) in which there are no rigid boundaries between languages. The book charts a way forward for African languages where greater attention is paid to what speakers do with the languages rather than what the languages look like, and offers several models for language policy and planning based on horizontal and user-based multilingualism. The chapters demonstrate how digital communication is being used to form and sustain communication in many kinds of online groups, including for political activism and creating poetry, and offer a paradigm of language merging online that provides a practical blueprint for the decolonization of African languages through digital platforms. This book is open access under a CC BY NC ND licence.

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This scholarly book explores the transformative role of proverbs in cultural education, preservation and scholarly discourse in South Africa. It emphasises the importance of integrating indigenous African knowledge into academic spaces to support decolonisation, (re)Africanisation and transformation. Proverbs are presented as tools for promoting multilingualism, multiculturalism, social cohesion and mutual respect in South Africa's diverse society. The book addresses the United Nations' (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 (quality education), SDG 5 (gender equity), SDG 9 (innovation) and SDG 10 (reduce inequality). It serves as a teaching resource for proverbs in Northern Sotho/Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Xitsonga, isiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele, siSwati and/or Tshivenḓa (Sotho, Shangaan, Nguni and Venḓa, i.e. Soshanguve), as well as Chichewa and Shona, supporting cross-cultural understanding. Grounded in a scholarly project on a multilingual proverbs dictionary, the book applies theoretical frameworks such as conceptual metaphor theory, ethnopragmatics and translation quality assessment to analyse proverbs. This interdisciplinary approach bridges linguistics, anthropology and digital humanities, offering fresh insights into the semantics and cultural significance of proverbs. The chapters in the book explore themes like proverbs in music, their intersection with patriarchy, and translation quality assessment. Targeted at scholars and experts in languages, literature, linguistics and digital humanities, the book advances the study of proverbs while fostering cultural awareness and sensitivity. It highlights the value of proverbs as linguistic and cultural assets, enriching academic and practical applications across disciplines.

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More than just a book, Storytelling in Northern Zambia lets you watch videos of the storytellers while you read. Storytelling plays an important part in the vibrant cultural life of Zambia and in many other communities across Africa. This innovative book provides a collection and analysis of oral narrative traditions as practiced by five Bemba-speaking ethnic groups in Zambia. The integration of newly digitalised audio and video recordings into the text enables the reader to encounter the storytellers themselves and hear their narratives as they were recounted during Robert Cancel’s research trips to Zambia. Robert Cancel's thorough critical interpretation, combined with these newly digitalised audio and video materials, makes Storytelling in Northern Zambia a much needed addition to the slender corpus of African folklore studies that deal with storytelling performance. Cancel threads his way between the complex demands of African fieldwork studies, folklore theory, narrative modes, reflexive description and simple documentation and succeeds in bringing to the reader a set of performers and their performances that are vivid, varied and instructive. He illustrates this living narrative tradition with a wide range of examples, and highlights the social status of narrators and the complex local identities that are at play. Cancel’s innovative study tells us not only about storytelling but sheds light on the study of oral literatures throughout Africa and beyond. Its innovative format, meanwhile, explores new directions in the integration of primary source material into scholarly texts. This book is part of our World Oral Literature Series in conjunction with the World Oral Literature Project.

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More than just a book, Storytelling in Northern Zambia lets you watch videos of the storytellers while you read. Storytelling plays an important part in the vibrant cultural life of Zambia and in many other communities across Africa. This innovative book provides a collection and analysis of oral narrative traditions as practiced by five Bemba-speaking ethnic groups in Zambia. The integration of newly digitalised audio and video recordings into the text enables the reader to encounter the storytellers themselves and hear their narratives as they were recounted during Robert Cancel’s research trips to Zambia. Robert Cancel's thorough critical interpretation, combined with these newly digitalised audio and video materials, makes Storytelling in Northern Zambia a much needed addition to the slender corpus of African folklore studies that deal with storytelling performance. Cancel threads his way between the complex demands of African fieldwork studies, folklore theory, narrative modes, reflexive description and simple documentation and succeeds in bringing to the reader a set of performers and their performances that are vivid, varied and instructive. He illustrates this living narrative tradition with a wide range of examples, and highlights the social status of narrators and the complex local identities that are at play. Cancel’s innovative study tells us not only about storytelling but sheds light on the study of oral literatures throughout Africa and beyond. Its innovative format, meanwhile, explores new directions in the integration of primary source material into scholarly texts. This book is part of our World Oral Literature Series in conjunction with the World Oral Literature Project.

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The Miracle of Saint Mina is one of the core texts in the small corpus of texts written in Old Nubian, a Nilo-Saharan language spoken between the third and fourth cataract of the Nile river until about the fifteenth century, and written in an adaptation of the Coptic script. It is one of the oldest written indigenous African languages. The Miracle of Saint Mina, most probably written around 1000 A.D., is a classical miracle story featuring one of the most well-known Egyptian saints. This publication features a translation of the text into one of the remaining modern Nubian languages, Dongolawi-Andaandi, by El-Shafie El-Guzuuli, thus establishing for the first time a link between the Old Nubian literary heritage and the contemporary colloquial language. The Old Nubian is also accompanied by a revised translation to English and a grammatical analysis.

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Eugenia Smagina (Евгeния Б. Смaгина) first published her grammar of the Old Nubian language in 1986 in Russian. For more than thirty years the work has remained untranslated, even though the late Gerald M. Browne affirmed that “this lucid, well-argued presentation should be available to all Nubiologists and ought therefore be translated into a western language.”Slavicist José Andrés Alonso de la Fuente has prepared a first English translation of this concise but indispensable work, which forms a necessary counterpart to Browne’s classic Old Nubian Grammar. The grammar is divided into sections on script, lexicon, morphology, and syntax, and is followed by the analysis of a sample text, known as The Miracle of St. Mēnas.Smagina’s The Old Nubian Language provides an excellent first introduction into the grammar of this medieval Nilo-Saharan language.

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The Old Nubian Texts from Attiri is the first publication in the Dotawo: Monographs series. It presents heretofore unpublished material, an edition of a series of manuscripts discovered in the frame of the Aswan High Dam campaign at the site of Attiri, a rocky island in the Batn el-Hajjar region in the Sudan, and does so in an innovative way, through an intense collaboration of the editors under the name of the Attiri Collaborative. By bringing together their diverse backgrounds in linguistics, archeology, Bible studies, history, anthropology, and philology, the editors hope to have provided an example of a new model of collective manuscript editing and the results such collaboration can attain.The collection consists of 15 manuscript fragments that were all written in Old Nubian. Among these manuscripts special mention should be made of two parchment leaves from a codex dedicated to works on the Archangel Michael, a lectionary containing fragments from the Gospel of Matthew and the Second Letter to the Corinthians, as well as a rare letter written on a leather sheet.ContentsPreface | ixList of Tables | xiList of Figures | xGeneral Introduction | 13P. Attiri 1–2: The Attiri Book of Michael | 31P. Attiri 3–4: Lectionary | 59P. Attiri 5: Unidentified fragment | 75P. Attiri 6: Fragment | 79P. Attiri 7: Fragments | 81P. Attiri 6: The Head | 83P. Attiri 6: Sale | 85P. Attiri 6: Unidentified document | 89P. Attiri 6: Letter | 93Bibliography | 97ABOUT THE EDITORVincent W.J. van Gerven Oei is a philologist, publisher, and co-director of independent open-access publishing platform punctum books. He is a specialist of the Old Nubian language and co-editor-in-chief of Dotawo, the imprint of the Union for Nubian Studies. He also directs project bureau for the arts and humanities The Department of Eagles and is editor of the New World Summit. His recent publications include Cross-Examinations (MER. Paper Kunsthalle, 2015), and the edited volumes Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida (punctum, 2017) and with Mihnea Mircan, Allegory of the Cave Painting (Mousse, 2015). His three-volume work Lapidari (punctum, 2015) provides the first complete overview of socialist monumentality in Albania. As a translator, Van Gerven Oei works mostly with anonymous Medieval Nubian scribes and more recent authors such as Jean Daive, Hervé Guibert, Dick Raaijmakers, Avital Ronell, and Nachoem M. Wijnberg. His scholarly work has appeared in ArtPapers, Polish Archeology in the Mediterranean, postmedieval, Theory & Event, and tripwire, among other venues.

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Hares are popular creatures in African folktales. They are famous for behaving badly and always getting away with it. In this Nyungwe folktale, we see what happens when Hare refuses to forgive Hippo for stepping on his foot.

This is the English version. Versions of this book have been produced by the African Storybook Project in

• English
• Ateso
• Setswana
• Maa
• Oluwanga
• Ng’aturkana
• Lumasaaba (Lugisu)

The Red Zebra Project celebrates African storytelling in local languages.

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