Marten, Lutz

English

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500 REVIEWSAFRICADEREK NURSE AND GÉRARD PHILIPPSON (eds):The Bantu Languages.(Routledge Language Family Series.) London: Routledge, 2003.xvii, 708 pages. £170.There are approximately 500 Bantu languages, spoken by around 240 millionpeople in 27 sub-Saharan African countries. Of all the African languagegroups, the Bantu languages have the longest tradition of scholarly linguisticattention and probably the highest degree of description. To put all this intoone book—even a very large one—is no mean feat. Yet Derek Nurse andGérard Philippson are brave enough to aim to provide an up-to-date referencebook on the Bantu languages. The 700+ page book achieves its high aims atleast in part. It presents an overview of the field of Bantu linguistics, bringingtogether a set of distinguished Bantu scholars, the majority of whom have beenin the field for decades. The book provides an informed discussion of some ofthe more important areas of Bantu studies, and presents a wealth of casestudies of individual Bantu languages, including a plethora of new data.The book is divided into a thematic section of 12 chapters, and a secondpart comprising 17 grammatical sketches of selected Bantu languages orlanguage groups. In addition, the book includes an introductory chapter, anupdated classification of the Bantu languages, and language and subjectindices, and numerous maps and tables. Yet, even though it is in hard coversand the production is of a high standard, the published price of £170 makeslibraries the most likely buyers of this book; the pricing may actually preventthe wide circulation a book of this kind deserves, and I hope the publishers willoffer a paperback edition soon.The thematic chapters cover phonetics, phonology, tonology, derivation,tense and aspect, nominal morphology, and syntax on the one hand, andhistorical linguistics, historical classification, grammaticalization, languagecontact, and language acquisition on the other. The first three chapters dealwith sound structure—including the important topic of tonology, the secondthree with morphology, probably the most important area of Bantu grammar,including the key aspects of the noun class and agreement systems. This is allas it should be, but strangely all other aspects of Bantu grammatical structureare covered in one chapter entitled ‘Syntax’; the following chapters then turnto historical linguistics. Thomas Bearth, on syntax, does his best at least tomention some of the work in the field, but his real interest is in discourse-pragmatic and information-structure related effects on word-order, and hischapter might better have been called, and focused on, ‘Topic and focus’. Thiswould have allowed for another chapter on syntax, and perhaps also for chap-ters on semantics or typology; in this way, important work on Bantu languagesconducted from a more formal-theoretical perspective, for example withinLexical Functional Grammar or Principles and Parameters, would have re-ceived the attention it deserves, and some discussion could have been includedon the role of Bantu languages for the formation of linguistic, in particularsyntactic, theory.The following three chapters, on historical linguistics, include TomGüldemann on grammaticalization, which is of theoretical interest; the othertwo provide an overview of the state of the art in Bantu historical linguistics501REVIEWS(Schadeberg), and an update on ongoing work on Bantu classification by theeditors. The final two thematic chapters provide well-informed and accessiblediscussions of language contact (Mufwene), and language acquisition(Demuth). Yet this final part of the thematic section of the book is subject toanother odd omission—there is no chapter on socio-linguistic aspects of Bantulanguages: multilingualism, language and society, language policy andlanguage endangerment are all aspects of a language group which are nolonger ignored, and play a significant role in the African discourse on Bantulanguages—see, for example, Vic Webb and Kembo-Sure’s African Voices(Oxford, 2000), an excellent introduction to African linguistics which high-lights precisely these socio-linguistic questions, alongside structural aspects. Ofcourse space is limited, but the absence of a discussion of these questions to meis indicative of a slightly narrow conception of the field.The second part of the book contains descriptions of 17 Bantu languages orlanguage groups, selected according to geographical spread, availability ofsuitable authors and, in case of doubt, by including ‘lesser, rather than betterknown languages’ (p. 11). The authors of the chapters have quite a bit offreedom, and highlight different aspects of the language(s) they describe,although there is often a bias towards morphology, given the importance ofthis for Bantu on the one hand, and the slightly more difficult task of provid-ing a good description of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics on the other. Thesketches are certainly useful, and offer a wealth of new and interesting data,but there are two points which might be raised: first, more coherence—andcross-referencing—between chapters would have made a better book. Thus,for example, all examples in all chapters should have been fully and consis-tently glossed, translated, and graphically separated. Different concepts men-tioned in the thematic articles should have been taken up and cross-referencedin the relevant sketches. For example, in the historical linguistics chapter,reference is made to Katupha’s law which can be found in Makhuwa (p. 148),but the law is not referred to in Kisseberth’s Makhuwa chapter in the secondpart (and hence not in the index), even though the relevant data are discussed.Similarly, both Bearth in ‘Syntax’ and Watters in ‘Grassfield Bantu’ discussfocus in Aghem, using almost identical examples, without cross-references.Secondly, I am not convinced it was wise not to include better-knownlanguages in the second part. It is true that there is a need to describe moreBantu languages, but how much can you say about a whole language in 25 orso pages? It seems to me that for grammatical descriptions of lesser-knownlanguages a separate publication (e.g. Köppe’s series of grammatical sketches)might be more appropriate. And since we know more about languages likeSwahili and Chichewa, typological statements made about them in a shortspace are likely to be more accurate and more poignant.The book, then, provides a good summary of the results of work on Bantulanguage over the second part of the twentieth century, as well as an impres-sive collection of grammatical summaries of a variety of Bantu languages.However, as noted above, there are at least two major thematic omissions:there is insufficient discussion of theoretically informed work on Bantu, inparticular on Bantu syntax and semantics, and of sociolinguistic and anthro-pological aspects of Bantu languages. I think that these omissions are notaccidental. Rather, they seem to follow from an editorial decision essentially torestrict the scope of the book to, alongside descriptive work, work in thehistorical-comparative tradition, which, of course, is the context in which theeditors work. This is a pity, as this narrow scope does no service to the studyof Bantu languages. Work in the historical-comparative tradition has been502 REVIEWSextremely important in Bantu studies for a long time. It is, in a way, the foun-dation on which all of our work on Bantu rests. But it is also true that mostpractitioners of the historical-comparative framework are based in Europeand the USA, and are academically quite mature: of the 27 contributors tothe book, only two are from an African university, and only two are nativespeakers of a Bantu language; seven authors are from a North Americanuniversity, three from the (American-based) organization SIL, thirteen fromEurope, and quite a number are retired. It seems to me that a fair number ofyounger Bantuists (judged, for example, by recent theses) are interested intheoretically informed work on Bantu, and that, especially in Africa, linguisticdiscourse includes ‘applied’ questions such as language policy, language andidentity, or computational linguistics. One may deplore this, but I believe thata book such as this would have benefited from a wider perspective, not leastto make the field of Bantu linguistics more transparent and attractive to thegeneral linguist, and to the general linguistics student.In sum, The Bantu Languages is an important resource for the study ofBantu languages, and a valuable summary of the state of the art in the field,with special emphasis on historical-comparative work. The short languagedescriptions are a rich primary source of data, which will ensure the book’slongevity. Although the book would have benefited from a slightly widerperspective, so as to present a more comprehensive picture of current researchin Bantu, it is nevertheless a very welcome and important contribution toBantu linguistics.LUTZ MARTENRUTH WATSON:‘Civil Disorder is the Disease of Ibadan’: Chieftaincy and CivicCulture in a Yoruba City.(Western African Studies.) xii, 180 pp. Oxford, Athens, andIbadan: James Currey, Ohio University Press, and HeinemannEducational Books, 2003. £45.00 (cloth); £16.95 (paper).This historical monograph examines the making of a civic political culture inWest Africa’s largest city during the period 1829–1939. The author’s principalconcern is to explicate the relationship between chieftaincy and city politics,and how debates over Ibadan’s Olubadan and lesser chiefs constitute thesubstance and boundaries of urban political discourse. The book’s method,practically speaking, is also its argument—to challenge normative views ofIbadan politics ‘as a fixed set of political attitudes’, and to reveal instead civiccultures ‘as a contentious historical process’ (p. 9).This approach yields a number of important conclusions. Watson showsthat it is Ibadan’s history of militarism, and not any typological model ofurbanism, that forms the major contours of the city’s political culture in thenineteenth century. The core unit of Yoruba urbanism, the ile (household orcompound), were in Ibadan neither spatialized patrilineages nor firmly-rootedresidences but constantly shifting military retinues which could absorb newrefugees as clients and soldiers according to merit. By extension, chiefly titleswere neither reserved for particular ile nor hereditary in nature, but earnedthrough military fitness. Far from generating money, titles in fact createdenormous expenses for the holder, and were regarded above all as publicrecognition of a chief’s achievement of ola (honour). Ibadan’s infamous

Review of Derek Nurse and Gérard Philippson, eds., 'The Bantu Languages'

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Review of Derek Nurse and Gérard Philippson, eds., 'The Bantu Languages'

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