Prosody and Intonation in Non-Bantu Niger-Congo Languages: An Annotated Bibliography

Abstract

Most linguists are well aware of the fact that data pertaining to languages spoken in Africa are often less readily available than information on languages spoken in Europe and some parts of Asia. This simple fact is one of the first and largest challenges facing Africanist linguists in their pursuit of preliminary data and references on which to base their research. The challenge of locating relevant materials only increases in difficulty as the search for information narrows to include only certain subfields of linguistics or languages of a particular genetic stock. Africanist linguists interested in phonology and phonetics will find that a preliminary search for information and references pertaining to the study of intonation and prosody in African languages yields a significant bias towards materials focusing on languages in the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo language family, as well as a select few welldocumented languages spoken elsewhere on the continent. One can explain this research bias toward Bantu languages in terms of a number of factors, including the sheer number of constituent languages in this sub-family, the relatively peaceful conditions that exist in many of the nations in which people speak Bantu languages, and overwhelmingly significant factors that have influenced the post-colonial attitudes toward Europeans and Western research in certain parts of the African continent. This bias compounds the research difficulties faced by linguists interested in languages outside the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo family in that linguists have devoted less time to these languages, and the materials that exist are sometimes difficult to obtain.

This bibliography will provide an account of materials published over the past twenty-five years pertaining to the study of intonation and prosodic phonology and phonetics in non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages. I will assume that the reader has some familiarity with both African languages and linguistics. One will find an explanation of any limits on the scope and selection of materials included in this bibliography in this introduction.