African Languages

African Languages An Introduction

African languages and linguistic typology

Statistical unicodification of African languages

Many languages in Africa are written using Latin-based scripts, but often with extra diacritics (e.g. dots below in Igbo: i., o. , u. ) or modifications to the letters themselves (e.g. open vowels “e” and “o” in Lingala: ε, O). While it is possible to render these characters accurately in Unicode, oftentimes keyboard input methods are not easily accessible or are cumbersome to use, and so the v...

Indigenous Scripts of African Languages

In Africa there are a number of languages. Some of these languages have their own indigenous scripts. In this paper we present script analysis for the indigenous scripts of African languages, with particular emphasis to Amharic language. Amharic is the official and working language of Ethiopia, which has its own writing system. This is the first attempt to analyze scripts of African language to...

African languages and phonological theory

I’ve been asked to write about the mutual influence of African languages and phonological theory, specifically addressing two questions: What and how have African language contributed to phonological theory? What and how have linguistic theories contributed to the understanding African phonology? To treat these questions properly would be a major undertaking, first, because of the large number ...