Language history and linguistic description in Africa

the long version

To mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of Greenberg's Studies in African Linguistic Classification, the topic of African language history and classification was made a special focus of the 1995 conference. A third of the papers relate to this theme. These papers cover historical issues concerning the three major language families found solely on the African continent. Topics in phonetics and phonology, syntax and semantics and language planning are covered in the remainder of the volume.