This paper consists of four basic stages. In first stage African linguistics has been explored respecting to influential geographic factors and also history of the language which we use now as African language. It attempts to trace the role of Ham (Noah son) descendants with their immigration to Africa and also investigates significant effects that Islam and Arabic language have imposed to this continent in 19th century. In this aspect, it is understood that with considering dominance of racial interpretation about Africa history, Hamitic notion has occupied this history for at least 200 years
second stage defines the concepts about objectives of primary African linguistic studies before and after 19th century, the locations where linguistic studies has been commenced and pioneer people who have participate in early fieldworks as researchers and as informant native speakers.
Travelers, European missionaries and afterwards with colonization of several African countries the militaries and new colonial governments with different intentions and objectives tried to examine African linguistic systematically. Great social disruptions and population displacements due to slave trade, invasion and intrusion through continent led linguistic studies occurring in refugee areas and distant from language's core active use and consequently ethnic linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects were ignored in researches.
The case research by European missionaries in Freetown, Sierra Leone-colony librated slaves- in early 19th century with religious objectives carried out in order to translate Bible to African languages Informants of languages had forgotten their native languages or hadn't used it for a long time after their capture and their children were semi-speakers as they had been born in the colony, though. Similar to linguistic work in Freetown, many other linguistic investigations were fulfilled in different regions which all represented African languages in reduced versions, lacking in social deixis, registers and losing indigenous dialect styles.
The next phase probes among people who carried out linguistic research in Africa in the precolonial and colonial periods. Mainly missionaries in order to induce black people to convert their religions to Christianity provided them with translated scriptures of Bible. However, some missionaries depend on the policy of their countries persuaded natives to abandon their difficult languages and learn European languages and some translators preferred to introduce loan words from European language.
As the Policy of missions was delivering print copies of Bible to African individuals, fieldworkers and printers confronted some difficulties in preparing orthographies, fixing and reducing them and moreover in printing complicated diacritics of African languages. Although a conference in1854 tried to solve the problem of orthographic variations in African languages, it just reached to devising a standard alphabet a landmark in history of phonology.
Final stage talks about consequences of rival orthographies combined with rival standardization which created artificial bounders and consequently lead to dividing some languages or lumping them together in a way that affects on ethnicity of African societies. In fact colonization had an irreversible influence on of ethnolinguistic groups and dialects. The case "Ibo" language in Nigeria and two languages of Senegal have been monitored in this part as an example and subsequently the observed results have been presented.
To start my review firstly I must emphasize that this paper really impressed me. It is quite informative, erudite and well-organized. The section concerning historical tracking of linguistic background of Africa continent is so comprehensive. Case studies brought from various areas of Africa give a vivid, explicit insight about the circumstances of linguistic issues before and after colonial encounter and providing various citations stated by several researchers in different periods of time and deriving enlightened facts and results from fieldworks' observations makes the paper valid, reliable and rich.
However I think if sociolinguistics aspects of colonization and other factors which have been imposed to African linguistic during last centuries had been explored as much as historical aspect, this paper would be much more instructive and versatile. As a matter of fact with observing social interactions and doing discourse analysis in communication between native African speakers and colonial communities including new immigrants, author could have created brilliant pragmatic outcomes.
Furthermore there is no comment or quotation made by African linguists or native speakers in this paper and I believe they had definitely lots of remarks to be mentioned about their languages, their ethnolinguistic categorizations, delimitation, abolitionist movements, encroachments and so on. However for a permitted space of a paper investigating all aspects of this topic is kind of unachievable and the author has tried to manifest main related subjects and results briefly and efficiently.
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