<scp>A</scp>frica, Language Research in

Most research on languages in Africa in one way or another reflects the continent's tremendous linguistic diversity. That languages have become such an important marker of difference, identity, and inequality is a result of the protracted colonial encounter and the definition of powerful linguistic ideologies. Intellectual developments in Europe produced a notion of language that essentialized it as inextricably bound up with ethnicity and territory so as to render the colonized countable and governable. The particular combination of mission, colonial administration, and linguistics resulted in the “invention” of around 2,000 African languages. The empirical confrontation with this high linguistic density has generated or contributed to the disciplines of linguistics (typology, grammaticalization), variation and contact linguistics, and sociolinguistics (critical sociolinguistics, language planning, language and education, and multilingualism). Current trends in sociolinguistics profit from ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and postcolonial theory in their recognition of multilingualism as a “new linguistic dispensation.”