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LANGUAGE
&
COMMUNICATION
Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343
www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom

Subjected words: African linguistics

and the colonial encounter
Judith T. Irvine
Department of Anthropology, West Hall 101, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
MI 48109-1107, United States

Abstract

The systematic study of African languages emerged in the 19th century as a scientic eld along
with other European projects of information-gathering, religious proselytizing, and establishing an
imperial presence on the continent. This paper considers how the conditions ideological, social, and
material of linguistic research in the early colonial encounter inuenced the resulting descriptions
of African languages and the delimitation of linguistic boundaries. Frameworks and precedents from
those early projects have remained inuential in African linguistics, for example in the identication
of ethnolinguistic groups, in the shape of grammatical descriptions, and in the politics of
orthography.
2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Keywords: African languages; History of linguistics; Colonialism; Language ideologies; Missionaries; Ethnolin-
guistic groups

1. Introduction

In 1824, as a group of missionaries were about to depart from London for the Sierra
Leone colony in West Africa, their supervisors in the Church Missionary Society wrote
to instruct them about the task ahead. As part of their work of spreading the Gospel in
Africa, the missionaries would need to investigate African languages so that the scriptures

E-mail address: jti@umich.edu

0271-5309/$ - see front matter 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2008.02.001
324 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343

could be translated and African scripture teachers could be trained. The CMS leaders
explained:
These two objects must be conjointly pursued. Providing, in the rst instance, for the
adequate religious and general instruction of the Native Colonists, the Societys Mis-
sionaries will then take the most eectual measures, as a part of their regular duty,
for availing themselves of the aid of the Natives to ascertain and x the various lan-
guages and dialects, and to prepare suitable books therein.
...
The number of dierent languages and dialects spoken by the . . . Africans should be
exactly ascertained, from the most intelligent of the Natives belonging to the respec-
tive countries; and, from them, should be collected all the information which they are
capable of aording, relative to these tongues. A regular plan should be formed, and
steadily acted on, for enlarging this information, as new opportunities may occur:
and means should be taken, that the most promising of these Natives should not
only retain, but grammatically learn, their own tongues, with a view to their future
services among their countrymen. (CMS, Proceedings for 1824; 1825, p. 207).
The project of language research was not unique to the Church Missionary Society, or
for that matter to religious organizations. And although missionaries predominated, other
kinds of investigators sometimes working in tandem with missionary organizations
were also embarking on programs of linguistic inquiry. How might we understand the
aims, assumptions, and methods of these projects? Some things about them are evident
in the quotation above: that African languages must be xed (because presumed unsta-
ble); that Africans did not know, so must be taught, the grammars of their own languages;
and that there was an exact number of languages and dialects. But why does it matter to
understand what these eorts were like? The question is not only of historical interest.
These early projects contributed to the shape of African linguistics as we inherit it today,
and as part of the colonial enterprise they had eects on the lives of the African lan-
guages speakers.
The systematic study of African languages emerged in the 19th century as a scientic
eld along with other European projects of information-gathering, but also along with
eorts at religious proselytizing and at establishing an economic and political presence
among the peoples of the continent. Recent scholarly reections on colonialism and ori-
entalism have illuminated many aspects of the discursive work that accompanied military
and economic domination. Some of these writings have focused on colonial language pol-
icies and the missionary project of conversion through spreading the Word, with its inev-
itable conceptual clashes between European and indigenous meanings.1 In this paper I
take up a somewhat dierent set of topics: within a broad (though necessarily brief) view
of early African linguistics, I focus on how European ideologies of language, and the con-
ditions in which linguists carried out their research, inuenced the resulting descriptions
of African linguistic structures and the delimitation of linguistic boundaries. As Susan Gal
and I have argued elsewhere (Irvine and Gal, 2000; Gal and Irvine, 1995), ideologies of
language are deeply concerned with boundary-construction the simultaneous making

1
Major discussions of language and colonialism in Africa include, for example, Comaro and Comaro (1991),
Fabian (1986) and the pioneering work of Curtin (1964). A more complete consideration of colonial linguistics
would include works focusing on other parts of the world; for an orientation, see Errington (2001).
 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343 325

of linguistic and social dierence. Ideologies of language are also embedded in history:
they have eects (consequences) while also being aected by contingent facts. Although
Africanist linguistics in more recent years has evolved in many ways, as information has
accumulated and as theories and methods have altered, nevertheless some of the frame-
works and precedents laid down in the early days remain detectable and inuential. This
paper traces some of those early foundations and their eects.
I confess that when I rst began to look into the early history of African linguistics, I
thought of my investigation more or less as an exercise in revealing the false consciousness
of 19th-century linguists and an opportunity to make lots of fun and condescending
comments about them. Blinded by their racist agendas, they failed, I thought, to see the
true state of things, which I could see with a clearer eye. But the state of (linguistic) things
is part of history along with the people who study those things. Hindsight is not clearer if it
does not recognize that it is not innocent of earlier viewings, and that the true state of
aairs may have been aected by those who have observed it in the past, and acted on their
observations. Now reformulated, my eort in this paper is to explore both the early lin-
guistic scholarship and the African eldwork conditions as immersed in history, inuenc-
ing one another. What were (and remain) the mutual entanglements of Africanist
linguistics, linguistic researchers, and African speakers? How have these entanglements
engaged linguistics in general, other elds of study, and African lives? Since this is a tall
order for a short paper, I focus on a few major points.

2. The area of study

First, a word about the geographical purview of African linguistics. In many disci-
plines, African turns out to mean sub-Saharan. There are many reasons for this delim-
itation, ranging from the plausible (the Sahara as cultural barrier) to the lamentable
(assumptions about a Great Divide between white and black, civilized and primitive,
literate and illiterate). Although Africanist linguistics usually includes some languages
found in the northern third of the continent, it generally relegates Arabic and its closest
Semitic language relatives to scholars of the Near East. The rationale relies on language
origins and their putative locations. According to traditional analyses of Arabics linguis-
tic history, Arabic emerged as part of a Northwest Semitic language family, along with
Aramaic, Phoenician, and biblical Hebrew. Because of the Biblical-era connection with
the Near East, Northwest Semitic was presumed to have originated in that region.
What counts as the relevant originary moment, though? Even if Arabics membership in
Northwest Semitic is taken as a given, the Semitic language family as a whole includes lan-
guages found in Ethiopia and southern Arabia (South Semitic). Many scholars consider
it possible, even likely, that Semitic originated in northeastern Africa before spreading to
southwest Asia (Ehret, 2000). Exactly when and where the various branches of the family
split o from one another is not clear. Moreover, some linguists though they are prob-
ably in the minority assign Arabic to South Semitic anyway.2 Depending, then, on what
moment one chooses as most signicant, and depending on whether Arabic belongs to a

2
For a discussion of these issues of Arabics classication within the Semitic languages, see Hayward (2000),
Hetzron (1972) and Faber (1997).
326 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343

branch that split o before or after the spread into Asia, some language ancestral to Ara-
bic might have begun on the African continent.
Should a reassessment of Arabics geographical origin, if accepted as taking place
within the African continent, convert Arabists into Africanists? (Or should the Near East
be considered part of Africa, as has also been suggested?) Perhaps; but the answer
depends on what kinds of questions are to be asked within an area framework. Why
should area linguistics be concerned primarily with reconstructing and representing lan-
guage origins, millennia ago? These questions illustrate the limitations of area studies if
areas are rigidly dened by continental boundaries. Such denitions deect scholarly
attention from studying ancient relationships across the southern end of the Red Sea, from
the Horn of Africa to southwest Arabia. And when combined with the focus on origins,
they deect attention from the roles Arabic has played in the northern third (and more)
of Africa for many hundreds of years. For wherever the remote origin of Arabic may
lie, the literary Arabic that entered North Africa in the seventh century along with Islam
came from Arabia, thus outside the African continent.
The written variety of Arabic was what mattered most to early 19th-century scholars,
since they tended to equate language with its written forms anyway. As a consequence of
this focus on origins and on literary language, the massive language shift that accompa-
nied Islams historical sweep across North Africa has often been ignored in an Africanist
linguistics that looked primarily to sub-Saharan Africa for its core subject matter. Ironi-
cally, however, the Africanist scholarship that excluded Arabic also erased from its view
those African scribal traditions that relied on Arabic language or Arabic script. From
sub-Saharan Africa such materials are still only poorly known.
As Richard Hayward (2000, p. 76) has recently pointed out, maps of African lan-
guages that omit Arabic, just as they also omit the European languages that arrived later,
are historically incoherent if they represent languages elsewhere in the continent that could
not have occupied their mapped locations as early as the seventh century. Such maps were
more common some years back than they are now. They partake of a widespread tendency
in the western world to treat Africans as outside history, as if their languages and social
systems were timeless and static, persisting in the same way while other peoples came
and went. In that view, if anything did change in Africa the changes were assumed to
be due to the inuence of outsiders, such as Arabs or Europeans. Accordingly, for
19th-century audiences a story of Arabics intrusion from the north coincided tidily with
European incursions into Africa also from the north and thus seemed to support a
master narrative of racial history in which passive black Africans endured wave after wave
of invasions by more aggressive, more civilized, and whiter, men. (The gendered sense of
men should indeed be understood here.) This story presented African history as a recur-
sive series of conquests by whiter and more masculine races moving in on blacker, more
feminine races, culminating in the European conquests in the late 19th century.3
Lurking in this picture, literally for some scholars and metaphorically for others, was
the Biblical story of the sons of Noah and the curse of Ham. Cursed for seeing his father

3
For the association of whiter races with masculinity and darker races with femininity, see dEichthal and
Urbain (1839) and discussion in Irvine (2001); this gendering of race was a widespread notion, but dEichthal
presents a particularly explicit version. On (fractal) recursivity as an ideological process see Irvine and Gal (2000).
For a classic assertion of human history including African history as a series of racial conquests, with degrees
of civilization depending on degrees of whiteness, see de Gobineau (1853), especially the nal section.
 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343 327

naked, Ham departed, and his progeny dispersed into Africa; Shem stayed in the Near
East and sired the Semites; Japhet, in some versions of the story, gave rise to Europeans
and the Indo-European language family. By the 19th century the curse of Ham had
already served for many centuries as a rationale for enslaving Africans, by Muslim as well
as European slavers. In that connection the idea of Hamites in Africa was nothing new,
nor was it new to suppose that major populations of the Old World arose from Noahs
sons. Once linguists began to distinguish among major language families, however, and
connect them with racial history, Hams place became problematic (see, e.g., Bunsen,
1848). Were Hams ospring black, because African, or white, because descended from
Noah? On the linguistic side of this question, as information about languages in Africa
increased, how were scholars to account for the fact that some languages spoken in Africa
seemed plausibly related to the (white) Semitic languages, while other languages seemed
to be utterly dierent? If a languages structures resembled Semitic closely but not too
closely it could plausibly be considered Hamitic, and its speakers must have more white
ancestry than did the speakers of those African languages that did not resemble Semitic at
all (Lepsius, 1880).4
These questions remained insistent even when, after the rise of Darwinian evolutionism,
the literal sense of the Biblical story began to fade. Yet, faded or not, discussions of Afri-
can language families remained consistent with the story of Noahs sons for decades,
retaining their names as language-family labels. By the later decades of the 19th century,
when human history was known to have much greater time depth than Biblical literalism
aorded, and race science began to dominate the scholarly world, the academic literature
increasingly represented Hamites as white and explained African language structures as
derived from racial mixtures when the Hamites moved southward into Africa (Lepsius,
1880). As Meinhof (19101911 and 1912) suggested, when the Hamites arrived in Africa
they must have married black women already living there women whose languages were
not even part of the Noatic superfamily.
The notion of Hamitic invasions from the north has haunted African history for at least
200 years, along with the dominance of racial interpretations. In 1990s Rwanda, for exam-
ple, some of the perpetrators of the Tutsi genocide claimed that the Tutsi were of Hamitic
origin and should therefore be sent back north where they came from, preferably already
dead (Fenton, 1996). On the linguistic front, the notion of a Hamitic language family
proposed in the 19th century but perhaps most conspicuously asserted by Meinhof in
1912 persists in some scholarly circles, although it is emphatically abjured in others.
The putative membership of this family has shifted over the years but was always inuenced
by racial interpretations, such as whether typical speakers were tall.5 Some linguists today,
particularly in continental Europe, still refer to a Hamitic language group, although they
accord it a much narrower membership than Meinhof did. Meanwhile, most American lin-
guists prefer to avoid the term Hamitic, using instead terms like Afro-Asiatic for the

4
While Lepsius articulated this view especially clearly, it pervades much 19th-century literature. See, e.g.,
Prichard (1843), Appleyard (1850, pp. 1213), Lefevre (1894, p. 158). For some writers, the major theme was the
connection between Semitic and whiteness: see, e.g., Lottner (18601861), who constructs a descending scale
toward the Negro rather than focusing on a Hamitic group per se.
5
Meinhofs (1912) Die Sprachen der Hamiten is a conspicuous example of a work in which racial and cultural
interpretations inuenced the putative membership of a Hamitic language family. For an example of a widely
read anthropological work that follows in Meinhofs footsteps, see Seligman, 1957 (rst edition 1930).
328 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343

entire language family the largest unit and Cushitic for an East African branch. Still,
the ghost of Ham and his invading ospring has not quite been exorcised.

3. Sites of early linguistic eldwork

In the absence or assumed absence of written texts, the linguistics that emerged out
of the encounter between Africans and Europeans was a linguistics largely framed by out-
siders. In its earlier years, up to about 1800, information-gathering about African lan-
guages consisted mainly of brief wordlists collected by travelers along with other
curiosities and souvenirs of their voyage. A few Catholic missions that were established
at trading posts along the African coast attempted to translate catechisms and to system-
atize language learning and teaching, but these studies and translations were not widely
distributed outside the mission.6 In any event, Africans were not always eager to cooperate
in allowing Europeans to study a local language, as Sanneh (1983) has shown. The rulers
of 17th-century Benin, for example, refused to allow their subjects to give language lessons
to the Spanish Capuchin missionaries, preferring to keep the Capuchins in a condition of
linguistic isolation and dependency (Sanneh, 1983, p. 46). A few manuscripts in or about
African languages, especially Kongo, are known from the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, but very little was actually published until well into the 19th century.7 A six-volume
survey of the worlds languages, published in 18001805 (Hervas y Panduro, 18001805),
could oer no more than a single page of information about the languages of Africa.
It was only in the 19th century, then, that African linguistic investigation became a sys-
tematic eort. Crucial to this development were the abolitionist movement and the pros-
elytizing work of the British and Foreign Bible Society (founded 1804), as well as the
intensifying European drive to expand trade networks and enlarge the reach of science.
European military eorts lagged behind, since the metropolitan governments were for sev-
eral decades reluctant to commit the forces and resources necessary for military control of
a large area. But if linguistic research preceded the European military penetration of the
African interior, it was never far from military activity. This was a time of massive social
disruptions and population displacements, due to the slave trade, internal warfare, and
outside encroachments. Much linguistic research took place in refugee communities
and other locales distant from a languages core areas of active and longstanding use.
And many of those core areas were socially disrupted too.
One of the most important sites for early linguistic research was the colony of liberated
slaves in Freetown, Sierra Leone. First established for slaves liberated from North Amer-
ica, early 19th-century Freetown was where British sea captains deposited people rescued
from slave ships captured o the coast of West Africa. The liberated slaves came from
many parts of Africa,8 but especially from regions suering the chaotic conditions brought

6
For a useful summary, with emphasis on the Bantu language family, see Cole (1971). Hair (1963) oers a list
of some early wordlists. One of the few grammatical studies that was actually published was Brusciotto di
Vetrallas (1659) Kikongo grammar, but this work seems to have been little known until it was discovered and
republished more than two centuries later (Grattan Guinness, 1882).
7
See Cole (1971, pp. 14), Doke and Cole (1984) and Proyart (1776).
8
Koelles (1854) great inventory, the Polyglotta Africana, presents 250-word vocabularies in more than 100
languages. All of this material was gathered in Sierra Leone. A smaller but similarly organized inventory is
Hannah Kilhams (1828) Specimens of African Languages, the material for which was also gathered principally in
Sierra Leone.
 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343 329

Fig. 1. Koelles map, attempting to locate the homelands of African languages recorded in Freetown, Sierra
Leone. Koelle (1854), Polyglotta Africana. Scale: each square represents about 250  250 square miles.

about by slave raiding and warfare. As the center for British abolitionist eorts in West
Africa, Freetown became the center of Anglican missionary operations, including impor-
tant early linguistic work aimed at Bible translation and religious conversion.9 For several
decades, European missionaries working in Freetown undertook to study and codify lan-
guages whose principal homelands might be nearby or might be hundreds, even thousands
of miles away.
Fig. 1 shows a map produced in Freetown in 1854 as an attempt to locate the home-
lands of African languages recorded from among Freetowns population of liberated
slaves. The map accompanied missionary Sigismund Koelles great inventory, the Polyg-
lotta Africana, which presents 250-word vocabularies in more than 100 languages spoken
in Freetown (Koelle, 1854). Koelle could identify these languages homelands only by
interviewing his informants about the towns they came from and had passed through
on their way to the coast.
In considering the possible eects of the Freetown setting on the linguistic information
obtained there, one must bear in mind that distance and time away from a homeland can
have eects on language and memory. Sometimes the only speaker of a particular lan-
guage who was available in Freetown was someone who had not used the language for
20 years. Sometimes, moreover, the Freetown linguists only informants were people
who had been children at the time of their capture. The linguists often worked with

9
For some detail see Hair (1967), Curtin (1964), Fyfe (1962), Sanneh (1983), and the Sierra Leone archive of
the Church Missionary Society.
330 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343

children anyway, because they often made their linguistic inquiries in the context of a mis-
sion school. In Freetown, some of these children were semi-speakers, born in the colony
and having only an incomplete command of their parents tongue.10 In any case, social
conditions in the colony were very dierent from those in the homelands. Inevitably,
the ways of speaking that emerged in the new locale were dierent too. Specialist vocab-
ularies and rhetorical styles rarely survived the move, nor did those linguistic forms index-
ing social relations that no longer prevailed. The demographics of the new locale could
result in register loss, dialect leveling, language mixing, or language shift. So, for example,
a language that was dominant among people called Ibos in Freetown turned out later,
when missionaries actually went to a place they took to be in Iboland in eastern Nigeria,
to be incomprehensible to the local population (Irvine, accepted for publication).
While Freetown was the site of many languages rst descriptions, there are many other
cases of linguistic work done in refugee communities or with resettled populations else-
where in Africa. Examples would include the town of Abeokuta in Nigeria, a town lled
with refugees from wars further north;11 the Spelonken mission settlements in southern
Africa, where a refugees koine was described as if an ethnic language (Gwamba, and
later, Thonga; see Harries, 1988); or the missions in what is now Zimbabwe, around
which populations resettled that had been displaced by warfare and the activities of
Rhodes British South Africa Company (see Chimhundu, 1992 for the relationship
between these [re-]settlements and language descriptions). One could cite many more, just
as there are many cases in which linguistic research was done with prisoners or with chil-
dren removed from their families. For example, W. H. I. Bleeks investigations of Bush-
man language and folklore in the 1870s were based on meetings with a group of
prisoners, miles from home; Faidherbes (1865) description of Serere-None came from
interviewing a teenager captured during a French military expedition; Haensels investiga-
tions of Temne relied largely on children residing at his mission school, as did Rabans
work on Yoruba.12

10
Missionary reports from Freetown by the 1840s suggest that children born in the colony to liberated slaves
became bilingual or even tended to shift to some form of English. For example, as early as 1831 the missionary
Jonathan Raban (CMS C A1/0180) commented on the children born in the Colony (for whom a knowledge of
the Native Dialects is not needful). Perhaps missionary Grafs (1845; CMS C A1/0 105) complaint about colony-
born young men who glory in foppish dress and whose liberated-slave parents fondly call a creole and respect
as an Englishman suggests the use of Krio or of some variety of English language. It is unclear exactly when
and how the linguistic shift to Krio and English dominant among the creole descendants of liberated slaves by
the end of the century occurred. Schon (in Schon and Crowther 1842, p. 358) claimed that the children of the
Liberated Africans speak the language of their parents with uency and correctness. However, he made this
claim in the context of arguing for more missionary attention to African languages; and since he himself had paid
close attention to only two of those languages, his assessments of uency and correctness must be subject to
doubt. Samuel Crowther (1875), who had worked with Schon, commented on the imperfect knowledge of the Ibo
language among Freetown-born descendants of Ibo-speaking parents. The troubles encountered by the
Freetown-born Ibo John Christian Taylor when attempting to do translation work in Nigeria might be partially
attributable to this problem. (See correspondence in the CMS Niger Mission archive on Taylors rejected
translations, and Irvine (accepted for publication)).
11
Biobaku (1957) provides considerable detail on the 19th-century history and demography of Abeokuta, a
town founded in 1830 in the aftermath of the fall of the Oyo state. Though founded by Egba people, the towns
population was diverse, since the leaders had an open-door policy [that] was extended to all the displaced
persons of that era of anarchy and disruption (Biobaku, 1957, p. 18).
12
See Haensels correspondence, CMS CA1/108, and his Memorandum on the Reduction to Writing of the
Timmani Language, CA1/108(b); see also Rabans correspondence (CMS CA1/0180) and Raban (1831).
 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343 331

These conditions of linguistic work tended to result in representations of African lan-

guages in reduced versions, lacking in social deixis other than pronouns and kinship
terms, and simplied in syntax. The reduced representations coincided with Europeans
assumptions about Africans as primitive, living in simple societies that is, knowing
no social distinctions Europeans could accept as legitimate and either lazy or inter-
ested in all the wrong things. Consider the missionary David Livingstones comments
about SeTswana vocabulary (this is the famous Dr. Livingstone, as in Dr. Livingstone,
I presume):
Mr. Moat has been collecting words in the Sechuana language for the last 43 years
and nds new ones every week. In eight years, I had upwards of seven thousand
and I rejected many hundreds either as uncouth or to me quite useless. Who but a
mad philologist would collect at least a score for the dierent gaits or modes of walk-
ing as erect, stooping, leaning backwards, sideways, from side to side, wriggling, lift-
ing the feet high, very straight, slouching, swaggering. I think there were eleven
names for a lion and no end of words meaning dierent shades of fools. [Living-
stone to John Kirk, 14 February 1865; R. Foskett 1964, p. 99.]
Even today, when most linguists believe all languages are formally complex, academic lin-
guists descriptions of African languages still largely neglect social deixis, registers or
styles; even dialect variation is rarely attended to.13 It is true that some prominent schools
of academic linguistics ignore those phenomena everywhere, not just in Africa. Neverthe-
less, much of the African linguistic literature is written as if the only dierentiation among
Africans that matters is ethnic, and as if ethnic dierence and linguistic dierence always
coincide an issue to which I shall return.

4. The early eldworkers

Much of the linguistic research in Africa, in the precolonial and on into the colonial
period, was done by missionaries. Although there were also travelers, civil servants,
and military men who produced important linguistic reports, the predominance of
missionaries up to the mid-20th century is undeniable. For the missionaries, language
study was incidental to the goal of religious conversion and religious instruction. While
virtually all missionaries were exhorted to learn indigenous languages in order to
impart religious concepts eectively,14 the more ambitious aim especially among Prot-
estant organizations, at the policy level was for translation work so that converts
could have direct access to Scriptures in their own tongue. Nevertheless, given the
diculty of linguistic study, some missionaries were quite content if their potential

13
In recent years, however, a rapidly growing sociolinguistic literature from South Africa has been considering
these topics. See, e.g., Herbert (1992, 1994), Mesthrie (1995), and McCormick and Mesthrie (1999), among other
sources. Sociolinguistic research on register variation and social deixis has been sparse in mainstream linguistics
for other African regions, although language teaching materials sometimes have useful information.
14
Fabian (1991, p. 141) quotes Charles Lavigerie, founder of the important White Fathers Catholic missionary
organization, commenting in 1880: I came close to forbidding [the missionaries], under threat of ecclesiastical
censure, to speak French among each other, so as to force them to speak only the language of Blacks.
332 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343

converts would just abandon their languages in favor of some nice civilized European
language in which they could be more conveniently and thoroughly instructed and
led into habits more wholly civilized. It was in this vein, for instance, that C.J. Lat-
robe, Secretary to the Missions of the United Brethren, wrote to the Committee of
the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1809, requesting extra copies of the Bible in
Dutch:
To learn the Hottentot language was next to impossible to our Brethren, nor was it
necessary in that part of the country to which they went, (about 130 miles from Cape
Town,) as most of the Hottentots could understand Low Dutch. . . . Several hundred
Hottentots have, since the year 1790, learnt to read, and the most valuable present
that could be made to them would be Bibles or Testaments [in Dutch] . . . By degrees,
after the Hottentots had been brought to the knowledge of the truth, and experi-
enced the power of the Lord in the conversion of their souls, the Missionaries led
them into better habits; and now people, who formerly sought roots for their sup-
port, and lived like wild beasts in the woods, are sowing and planting, and had last
year a harvest of 800 sacks of corn. [Reports of the British and Foreign Bible Society,
Sixth Report, pp. 312314 (1810)]
Although this attitude was most prevalent in the early days of missionizing, it lingered on
where local languages were deemed too dicult or too various, and in regions whose colo-
nial governments favored European languages on principle. Indeed, the policy in regions
dominated by France (and Portugal) was that African education, no matter who provided
it, should be conducted only in the European language.15
In British-dominated regions, however, and among Protestant missionaries, opinion
and policy swung toward instruction in native languages where possible. Only then
(the missionaries thought) might the native begin to understand Christianitys dicult
spiritual concepts; and it was only right, after centuries of the slave trade, to provide
benighted Africans with the gift of the Bible in their own languages, which God had
originally instilled in them. As the ocial instructions to Anglican missionaries in
1847 put it,
Remember . . . that it will be very important that you should collect all the informa-
tion in your power respecting the native philology of central Africa with a view to the
one great boon which is alas! still unpaid, and which alone can aord any real com-
pensation for the woes of Africa, the Bible in their own tongues. [CMS, Parent Com-
mittee, 23 November 1847; CMS C A2/L1]
Table 1 shows an early dialogue for missionary use in instructing Africans in basic
Christian concepts. As time went on, there were increasing eorts to render more subtle
ideas in African languages; but many missionaries who tried to do this complained that
the languages did not oer exactly the right words. In consequence, some translators
preferred to introduce loan words from European languages. Other translator/linguists,

15
But see an early eort in Senegal to institute Wolof literacy and Wolof-medium education (Irvine, 1993;
Gaucher, 1968; Dard, 1825, 1826).
 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343 333

Table 1
Nylander (1814), dialogue from A Spelling-Book of the Bullom Language, pp. 1920
1. Nghe neh ngha tukeh, lileh ngha heleh; erum buleing 1. Who made the heaven, earth, and sea; all trees,
nviss ngha sose tre ah? beasts, and shes?
Foy. Batukeh. God.
2. Mpal e woo ngho Foy ngha nyerick n tre manah 2. In how many days did God make all these
buleing? things?
Mpal e mainbull. In six days.
3. Yeh Foy ngha hoa e pal e mainting? 3. What did God on the seventh day?
U foll hoa mainting n u ngha rubah. He rested on the seventh and made it holy.
4. Nghe neh ngha moa? 4. Who made you?
Foy, ngho no ngha nyerick n tre buleing. God, who made all things.
5. Yeh Foy ngho kuiah ngho pinkin no? 5. What did God take to form a man?
Gbett. Ground.
6. Moa ko woo e? 6. Are you going to die?
Oh. Yes.
7. Yeh wumdeh woo ah? 7. Why must you die?
Ah ngha re yeh n bang ko ke Foy. I have done bad against God.

however, such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther himself a missionary-educated liberated slave

of Yoruba origin, eventually appointed Bishop of the Niger deepened their inquiries
into the indigenous idiom, arguing that the Christian Scriptures could be made more
meaningful to Africans if judicious use be made of native ideas (Crowther, 1869).16
Crowthers Bible translations (e.g., Crowther and King, 1862) have been hailed as a
monument of African-language literature17 achieved, it has been suggested, not only
by their poetic sophistication, but also by creating a conjuncture between Yoruba and
Christian religious concepts. As Apter (1992, p. 203) comments, As Crowther rewrote
pagan knowledge into Christianity, he rearmed the critical power of pagan knowledge
by deploying its vernacular lexicon literally rewriting Christianity into the language of
Yoruba elders and ritual specialists to promote the role of Africans in running their
own religious and political aairs.18

5. The focus on print literacy and its consequences

Bible literacy for Africans depended, of course, on Bible translations and on the prep-
aration of literacy materials, starting with orthography. From the rst, the goal was print
literacy, and European missionaries imagined distributing thousands of copies of

16
See Peel (2000) for some examples of Crowthers word choices in his Yoruba translations, as well as for the
larger context of missionization among Yoruba.
17
See, e.g., Hair (1967, p. 17).
18
Peel (2000) argues, however, that Crowthers translations also drew on Muslim traditions then already known
among Yoruba.
334 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343

European-produced Bibles to individual Africans (who were to read them privately, in

silence).19 Orthographies therefore had not only to represent the African language
and in so doing to x (stabilize) and reduce it but also to be suitable for printers type.
This was not a trivial constraint, because printers disliked dealing with a lot of diacritics,
especially delicate ones that tended to break o (like the dots underneath some letters in
modern printed Yoruba). Even after missions and colonial administrations began to set up
their own printing presses, the equipment, including fonts, was almost always imported
from Europe, at considerable expense. The more missions that could share a press and
use the same fonts, the better or at least the more economical. Nevertheless, many mis-
sionaries devised their own systems, which were sometimes based on convenience for their
particular African language, but sometimes based on the missionarys own native lan-
guage, or on his dislike of particular sounds, such as click consonants or tone distinctions.
For example, in a work addressed to missionaries, the linguist F. Max Muller wrote (1867,
p. xxix): It would seem small blame to any alphabet if it failed to provide natural repre-
sentatives for such unearthly sounds as the Hottentot clicks.20 Such comments suggest
that the then-common expression for providing an orthography, reducing a language
to writing, might be taken quite at face value.
There were many quarrels over which orthographies were best. Rival missions set
up competing systems, whose appearance in print made the linguistic varieties they
represented look more dierent than they sounded.21 Although it did not escape linguists

19
The following passage from missionary-linguist John Ulrich Graf (1855) [CMS C A1/0 105] expresses both the
goals and the trials he experienced in his eorts at Bible translation. The trials are apparently from Sierra Leone,
the goals are expressed in relation to the Yoruba country. I have italicized a portion of Grafs text that was crossed
out by the CMS authorities as not to be printed in CMS publications. The underlining, however, is Grafs:

Foremost stands the need of the Bible, the whole Bible translated & printed with all possible dispatch into
hundred thousand Copies. You have not here [i.e., in Yoruba country] to teach the half-witted liberated slave
the formation, lineaments and merits of the ABC and step by step unite letters into words, of which, after all he
knows nothing but the mechanical formation without suspecting ought of the deep & thrilling import hid within
its mysterious component parts! You have not to explain week after week but half known words, in an unknown
tongue, the meaning of a certain, formerly manufactured word and after hours & days & months explanation
be cooly told me no savi! as the sorry recompence for all your toil! Here the characters of the alphabet are
quietly learnt by an intelligent & eager Scholar he marvels at the ingenious formation of a word by certain
letters; wonders beyond measure that he can speak his own language by certain mechanical signs and when
he at last deciphers the wonders of God in his printed Gospel he seems full of amazement; treasures up the
book & its contents, makes it his travelling companion, and spreads the news wherever he goes! Henceforth
let the missionaries die & the Native Teachers be removed, if it must be so; but the living word, with its deep
meaning for every soul of man and its exponent & lifegiving originator, the Holy Spirit, it has kindled are
in the land not to be quenched by many waters, stronger than Hell, everlasting as God! Oh give them the
Bible let everything give way to that; nothing is comparable to that in deep & lasting importance.
20
Elsewhere (Muller, 1855. p. lxxix) Max Muller commented, I cannot leave this subject without expressing at
least a strong hope that, by the inuence of the Missionaries, these brutal sounds will be in time abolished.
21
See, e.g., discussion in Lepsius (1863, pp. 2829), including the following: When the publication of the New
Testament and Psalms in the language of the African Tsuana (Betchuana, Betjuana, Sechuana) was lately
completed by the London Missionary Society, the Secretary of the Church Missionary Society expressed to the
Secretary of the Paris Society the joy which he felt when he thought of the rich blessings which would thence
accrue to that people, and to the labours of the French missionaries scattered among them. But, replied his
sympathising friend, is it not sad, that these thousands of copies already published are entirely unavailable and
sealed to our French missionaries who labour among the same people, and to all those who have received
instruction from them, simply because they make use of another orthography?
 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343 335

Fig. 2. Lepsiuss uniform orthography (1863), arranged in alphabetical order.

attention that orthographic dierences created a barrier to African literacy, resolving the
dierences proved dicult. To discuss these problems and settle quarrels, missionary orga-
nizations set up committees and conferences, locally and even internationally.
One of the largest and most famous of such gatherings was the 1854 conference con-
vened in London under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society and the Prussian
ambassador, the results later published (1855, 1863) by Karl Lepsius, a German Egyptol-
ogist. Spurred partly by the problems of devising orthographies for African languages, and
partly by Lepsiuss academic interest in a universal phonetics, the conference produced a
standard alphabet applicable to any human language and based on the physiology of the
vocal tract. The resulting scheme a precursor of the International Phonetic Alphabet is
justly regarded as a landmark in the history of phonology. Its publication was lauded by
Protestant missionary societies internationally. But it did not end orthographic disputes.
Its complex diacritics (see Fig. 2) made it a nightmare for printers,22 and inconvenient
for anyone focusing on a single language rather than many. Moreover, some important
works had already been printed in other systems; and Roman Catholic missions (among
others) never signed on. So orthographic variations and rivalries continued, as did confer-
ences attempting to resolve them.

22
The printer John Bellows commented on the Lepsius system as follows (1867, p. vii): It requires nothing less
for its accomplishment, than the revolutionizing of all the printing oces in the world; substituting for the roman
alphabet, a system which makes each letter of that alphabet a sort of lay gure upon which to hang all kinds of
hooks, and moons, and dots, and endless diacritical marks. As a practical printer, I feel certain that such a system
cannot be carried out. . . .The universal adoption of the system of Professor Lepsius would necessitate the cutting,
not a few hundred, but of many hundreds of thousands of new sorts of type!!! (emphasis original). See Lepsiuss list
of symbols, shown in Fig. 2.
336 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343

Notice, incidentally, that these symbols, indeed all the orthographies devised by Euro-
peans, are based on the Roman alphabet, even though it was well known that many Afri-
cans were familiar with Arabic script and had created versions of it suited for their own
languages. But while the religious works were supposedly destined for an African audi-
ence, the more immediate audience was the rank-and-le missionary who was not partic-
ularly well-educated and not necessarily linguistically talented. In producing printed
Scriptures for African-language literacy the primary goal of missionary linguistics
the needs of European printers, and missionaries who were mostly ignorant of Arabic,
came rst.

6. Identifying languages and ethnolinguistic groups

It is now a long time since that conference in 1854, but the issues it tried to deal with
remain present in African linguistics. On the academic side, the conferences focus on pho-
netics and, if less directly, phonology, with African language data contributing impor-
tantly to the eort to construct a universalistic framework, have strong echoes in
linguistics today. Phonetics and phonology are well studied in contemporary Africanist
linguistics, and they remain the topics in which African languages command the most
extensive and serious attention from linguistic theorists, i.e. non-area specialists. On the
practical side, however, orthographic disputes have continued to plague education and
publishing in many parts of Africa. Important and large-scale though it was, the 1854 con-
ference did not succeed in its eort to unify the representation of linguistic sounds. In
many African regions, the persistence of rival orthographies, especially when combined
with rival standardizations of other aspects of language, created some articial boundaries
(when dierent orthographies plus dierent standardizations appear to be quite dierent
languages) and limited the audience for indigenous-language publications.23 Of course,
equally articial boundaries could be created by a standardization process that grouped
quite dierent varieties together in the interest of eciency or of political unication.
Sometimes the linguists divided languages; sometimes they lumped them together.
These issues surrounding standardization and the representation of languages are
important not only in relation to literacy which would be important enough but espe-
cially in relation to ethnicity. Earlier, I mentioned that a language called Ibo (now usually
spelled Igbo) in Freetown proved elusive when missionaries looked for it in Iboland, its
putative homeland in eastern Nigeria. In spite of this diculty, and despite the diversity of
speech even in Freetown itself among people socially identied there as Ibo, the mission-
aries wrote condently about the Ibo of Nigeria and their Ibo language, as if about the
homogeneous language of a monolingual nation. As the missionary-linguist Koelle
remarked (1854. pp. 78),
In Sierra Leone certain natives who have come from the Bight [of Biafra, in eastern
Nigeria] are called Ibos. In speaking to some of them respecting this name, I learned
that they never had heard it till they came to Sierra Leone. In their own country they
seem to have lost their general national name, . . . and know only the names of their
respective districts or countries.

23
For example: Yoruba, in southwestern Nigeria, and a variety (Nago) across the border in Benin (see
Asinwaju, 1976).
 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343 337

Koelle assumed, evidently, that if these populations within Nigeria had no name to refer to
their whole nation, there must nevertheless have been such a name in the past. It had sim-
ply been lost. For 19th-century linguists, missionaries, and colonial administrators it was a
common assumption that language was the index of ethnic distinctiveness that Africans,
and all other human beings for that matter, had exclusive cultural identities, grounded in
linguistic dierence.
Recent research suggests that in Nigeria at the time, the word Igbo was simply a geo-
graphical term meaning upland, not referring to any social or linguistic unity. Its rst
clearly documented appearance as a name of a population and language comes not from
Nigeria at all, but from the Caribbean, where it was ascribed to a group of slaves imported
from the Bight of Biafra (southeastern Nigeria; Oldendorp, 1777, from a survey of the
Danish colony in the West Indies).24 So it seems to have been in diasporan settings that
some people from southeastern Nigeria coalesced into a named group, and their ways
of speaking at least acquired an umbrella label, and perhaps began to merge as well.
Meanwhile the situation in Nigeria itself remained far more variable. Among the people
of Nigerian Iboland there probably were some cultural relationships and linguistic con-
nections (see Manfredi, 1991), but also much variety and many links to populations out-
side the immediate region. At any rate, there does not seem to have been any sense of
ethnic self-consciousness in the period just before colonization.
Be that as it may, the colonial authorities institutionalized their construction of Igbo
ethnolinguistic unity, building it into colonial administration. After the British consoli-
dated their conquest of Nigeria and, after about 1922, tried to apply a policy of indirect
rule, administrative districts and institutions such as the Native Courts were to be orga-
nized so as to correspond with tribal groupings, based on language. Yet, the linguistic
side of this ethnolinguistic unity had been and remained hard to establish. In 1874, before
British rule had reached far into the interior, Bishop Crowther had declared: Like dis-
union in their government, the dialects of the Ibos . . . are multifarious; how to arrive at
the leading one has been to us a puzzle for years. (CMS CA3/04(a)).25 A later generation
of linguists tried a dierent approach, with just as little success. Union Ibo, a compromise
mixture created in the early twentieth century, was intelligible to no-one. Central Ibo, the
basis of yet another colonial eort at language standardization, suited some speakers but
alienated others.26
The Igbo case is but one of many that could be cited in which colonial regimes, in
concert with linguistic research, identied ethnolinguistic groups whose linguistic and
cultural homogeneity at the time is at best questionable.27 In what is now Zimbabwe,
for example, Ranger (1989) and Chimhundu (1992) have shown how the administrative

24
Hair (1967, p. 71) cites, as well, a 1627 inquiry among slaves at Cartagena, Colombia, listing the name Ibo.
25
Crowther published several works on Igbo (Crowther, 1857, 1882; Crowther and Schon, 1883). His comments
in these works and in his missionary reports show an increasing recognition of the linguistic diversity and the
diculty presented by any eort at standardization.
26
See Agbo (1981); several papers in Ogbalu and Emenanjo (1975, 1982), and Nwachukwu (1983). As Agbo
notes (1981, p. 355), By 1936 . . . the systematic study of the Igbo language was about a hundred years old. Yet
Miss M.M. Green (1936) could in that year say, with justied pessimism and much cogency, that A birds eye-
view of the present Ibo Linguistic situation is not . . . an inspiring prospect. Nearly four decades after the above
statement of Miss Greens, a student of the language could still assert with even more justied pessimism and
equal cogency that the Igbo linguistic situation is deplorable.
27
Irvine (2006) oers a more thorough discussion of these cases.
338 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343

identication of ethnic groups shifted during the colonial period, from wide groupings to
narrower ones and back to wider ones, in a context of social disruption, migration, and
mission rivalries. In many other cases, however, whatever linguistic and ethnic identica-
tions had been proposed by the time colonial regimes rst became established were the
ones that stuck. What was more likely to vary in those cases was how people were assigned
to them, not what the ethnolinguistic groups were deemed to be.
In short, the immediately precolonial and early colonial period was the time when many
African ethnic groups were identied named and delimited, for a global audience and for
their own membership. The linguistic research that identied particular African languages,
although conceived as recognizing distinct objects of study, often involved a practice of
lumping together or splitting apart linguistic varieties in order to produce territorially reg-
imentable language boundaries. Language, ethnicity, and territory were supposed to coin-
cide, and to dene population units on an administratively manageable scale not too
small, and not too large. Whatever shapes African societies had taken previously, and
however variable or multifarious their populations ways of speaking, the moment of col-
onization is when they were given that particular inection that turns cultural traditions
and genealogies into ethnicity, turns linguistic practices into named languages corre-
sponding (supposedly) to ethnic groups, and interprets multilingualism as a secondary
eect. Yet, it is often supposed that ethnolinguistic groups are primordial timeless,
homogeneous, and enduring and more real than any political regimes or institutional
history. The colonial institutions that regimented these presupposed ethnolinguistic iden-
tities have left many traces in postcolonial Africa, including some part of an ethnic self-
consciousness among contemporary Africans.
These representations of languages and the institutions that regimented them have also
left traces on African speakers linguistic practices and ideas about language. At stake is
not only who was to be considered Ibo, Yoruba, Shona, Tsonga (Harries, 1995),
and so on, but also what was to be considered Yoruba (etc.), linguistically. There are sev-
eral strands in this tangle. One of them is the relatively familiar problem of loss of dialect
variation as speakers shift toward a regimented standard, and the potential sense of infe-
riority imposed on speakers whose usage does not conform. So, for example, a South Afri-
can SeTswana speaker I worked with in the US insisted on checking her usage against her
highschool textbook (Setshedi, 1980), to make sure she gave me the real linguistic forms.
She did not want to speak to me as we do every day on the street, no matter how much I
protested.28 Although language standardization produces eects like this everywhere, in
some African cases (such as Igbo and Shona) the varieties being lumped together for stan-
dardization were markedly disparate.
Another strand concerns the representation of language dierence and boundaries.
Consider the purist approach taken by many linguists throughout the history of African
linguistics. In writing grammars and dictionaries of African languages such linguists
record only the forms they deem indigenous, purging foreign lexicon and constructions,
thus regimenting linguistic borders whose existence may be partly the consequence of (ear-
lier?) linguists activity. A case in point would be the Senegalese languages Wolof and

28
This problem did not arise with another SeTswana-speaker I worked with who came from Botswana. Issues
relating to South Africas language policy, under apartheid and after, complicate the question of dialect variation,
so that the homogenizing of ethnicity and language under the rubric of standard has had especially far-reaching
eects. See McCormick and Mesthrie (1999) and Makoni (2003), among other works, for more detail.
 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343 339

Sereer (discussed in greater detail in Irvine and Gal, 2000 and Irvine, 2006). These related
languages have been part of a regional sociolinguistic complex, the exact precolonial shape
of which is now dicult to discern but involved religious and political relations in the cha-
otic era of the Atlantic slave trade. Interpreting the situation in terms of ethnic dierence
assumed to correspond to linguistic dierence and working in nearby locales, the Cath-
olic missionaries Kobes and Lamoise set about writing grammars and dictionaries of
Wolof and Sereer. Although they organized their grammars along similar outlines,
the two linguists seem to have sought maximal dierence in lexical content, in order (as
Lamoise (1873) expressed it) to represent the original particular language God must have
placed in the minds of each ethnic groups ancestors. Lamoise, at any rate, found the task
of retrieving the purest form of Sereer dicult. It required, he wrote (1873, p. 329), not
only identifying the regional variety where Islam had penetrated the least, but also purging
the language of errors and vices: both the errors of fetishism into which Sereers had
fallen, and the vicious inuence of Islam and its Wolof perpetrators. He seems therefore
to have avoided or downplayed words and expressions that he thought came from Wolof
and Islam; these could be found in Kobess (1869, 1875) descriptions of Wolof. On what
grounds were these expressions segregated? No strictly linguistic criteria are obvious.
Today it is dicult to reconstruct precisely what Africans a century and a half ago took
labels such as Wolof and Sereer to mean under exactly what conditions they might
have applied such labels to linguistic practices or to sociological relations. In particular,
one cannot now be sure whether expressions that 19th-century linguists treated as borrow-
ings were or were not considered so by Africans at the time. Even today, although Wolof
and Sereer are generally spoken of as quite separate languages and ethnicities, the situa-
tion as regards everyday usage is more complicated. A dictionary of Sereer produced a
century after Lamoises work (Cretois, 1972) oers hundreds of words and expressions
marked W for Wolof, without other explanation. Whether these are recent borrowings
seems to me unlikely.
While this discussion of Wolof and Sereer is oversimplied, the general point is one that
applies widely in Africa: that the practices and people identied with ethnolinguistic labels
have been dierentiated and aligned according to ideological regimes of value that did not
spring unaided from the objects of description. It is not new to notice the constructedness
of ethnic classications under colonialism; it is less commonly noticed that the linguistic
identications might not be primordial either. To the extent that languages become iden-
tied with a particular set of linguistic descriptions and that these descriptions, produced
by linguists, become eective standardizations with eects on speakers practices, we must
recognize that linguistic research has consequences for linguistic practice.

7. Conclusion

Although space has permitted discussing them only briey, I have considered several
themes pertaining to African language research in the period of the early colonial encoun-
ter: the sub-Saharan and continental framework of Africanist research, and its implica-
tions for historical study; the signicance of diasporan and refugee settings as the sites of
linguistic research; the prominent role of missionaries and their religious ideologies of
language; the focus on print literacy and its eects on orthographies; and the processes
by which particular languages and populations became identied as ethnolinguistic
groups. These are some of the entanglements of Africanist linguistics and African history.
340 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343

A common thread is the making of boundaries what is considered dierence and what is
considered commonality; what is excluded and what is included in and through linguistic
representations. By such means, early research that sets the stage and denes the terms for
later work has particular importance, not only in the realm of research itself. Linguists
need to investigate not just to assume what kinds of inuences their representations
of languages may have on peoples ways of using them.

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 J.T. Irvine / Language & Communication 28 (2008) 323343 343

Judith T. Irvine is the Edward Sapir Collegiate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor. Since 1970, she has conducted ethnographic and linguistic research on language and
social inequality in Africa, with eldwork mainly in Senegal; and since 1992, she has conducted historical research
on the study of African languages in the 19th and early 20th century. She has also published many papers on
language ideologies, language and political economy, and ethnographic approaches to language, as well as works
on the history of anthropology and linguistics.