Linguists speculate that human languages often evolve in rapid or punctuational bursts, sometimes associated with their emergence from other languages, but this phenomenon has never been demonstrated. We used vocabulary data from three of the world's major language groups-Bantu, Indo-European, and Austronesian-to show that 10 to 33% of the overall vocabulary differences among these languages ar...

Walman, a language in the Torricelli language spoken in Papua New Guinea has an inflectional diminutive affix which occurs in agreement slots in various words, including verbs and adjectives in opposition to third person singular masculine, third person singular feminine, and third plural. It contrasts with diminutive affixes in most languages in that (1) it cannot appear on nouns; and (2) it i...

Basing himself largely on areal and typological arguments, Güldemann (2010) claims that neither Proto-Niger-Congo nor Proto-Bantu had more than a “moderate” system of derivational verb suffixes (“extensions”), and that both proto languages lacked inflectional verb prefixes. Although drawing largely on the same materials as Hyman (2004, 2007a,b), he arrives at the opposite conclusion that Niger-...

Recent scientific publications on data-driven part-of-speech tagging of Sub-Saharan African languages have reported encouraging accuracy scores, using off-the-shelf tools and often fairly limited amounts of training data. Unfortunately, no research efforts exist that explore which type of linguistic features contribute to accurate part-of-speech tagging for the languages under investigation. Th...

Clinical and technical information imparted in most African languages involves inexact terminology and code switching, so it lacks the explanatory power characterised by the English language. African languages are absent in the tertiary science education environment and forums where African scientists could present scientific material in the medium of African languages. This limits the developm...

This article reports on a production study that investigates the realisation of a single high tone in the verbal constituent in Northern Sotho, a Bantu language spoken in South Africa. The parameters of variation investigated are based on existing descriptive and theoretical literature and relate to numbers of syllables in the verb stem, morphosyntactic constituency and verb-internal morphologi...