Atlantic languages

The Atlantic or West Atlantic languages^[1] of West Africa are a proposed major group of Niger-Congo language family. The Atlantic languages are highly diverse and have never been demonstrated to form a unified group, so that linguists such as Dimmendahl and Blench treat them as three independent branches of Niger-Congo.

The Atlantic languages are spoken along the Atlantic coast from Senegal to Liberia, though transhumant Fula speakers have spread eastward and are found in large numbers across the Sahel, from Senegal to Nigeria and Cameroon. Wolof of Senegal and several of the Fula languages are the most populous Atlantic languages, with several million speakers each; other significant members include Serer and the Jola dialect cluster of Senegal and Temne in Sierra Leone. Many Atlantic languages exhibit consonant mutation, and most have a noun class system similar to that of the distantly related Bantu languages. Some members are tonal, while others have pitch accent systems. The basic word order tends to be SVO.

Classification

The Atlantic family was first identified by Sigismund Koelle in 1854. In the early 20th century, Carl Meinhof claimed that Fula was a Hamitic language, but August von Klingenhaben and Joseph Greenberg's work conclusively established Fula's close relationship with Wolof and Serer. W. A. A. Wilson notes that the validity of the family as a whole rests on much weaker evidence, though it is clear that the languages are part of the Niger-Congo family, based on evidence such as a shared noun class system. However, comparative work on Niger-Congo is in its infancy. Classifications of Niger-Congo, usually based on lexicostatistics, generally propose that the Atlantic languages are rather divergent, but less so than Mande and other languages that lack noun classes.

David Sapir proposed a classification of Atlantic into three branches, a northern group, a southern group, and the divergent Bijago language of the Bissagos Islands off the coast of Guinea-Bissau (Wilson 1989). This tripartite classification is retained by linguists such as Blench who break up Atlantic into its constituent parts.

Consonant mutation

Many Atlantic languages exhibit consonant mutation, a phenomenon in which the initial consonant of a word change depending on its morphological and/or syntactic environment. In Fula, for example, the initial consonant of many nouns changes depending on whether it is singular or plural:

Noun classes

Atlantic languages have noun class systems similar to those found in other Niger-Congo languages, most famously the Bantu languages. Bantu noun classes are marked with prefixes, and linguists generally believe that this reflects the proto-Niger-Congo system. In Atlantic, however, some languages, such as Temne, use prefixes while others, such as Fula, have noun class suffixes. Joseph Greenberg argued that the suffixed forms arose from independent post-posed determiners that agreed with the noun class.

CL-Noun CL-Det > CL-Noun-CL > Noun-CL

In fact, some Atlantic languages, such as Serer, do mark noun class with both a prefix and a suffix.

1. ^ "West Atlantic" is the traditional term, following Diedrich Hermann Westermann; "Atlantic" is more typical in recent work, particularly since Bendor-Samuel (1989).

References

• Sapir, David (1971). West Atlantic: An inventory of the languages, their noun class systems and consonant alternations. Current Trends in Linguistics 7:45-112. The Hague: Mouton.
• Wilson, W. A. A. (1989). Atlantic. In John Bendor-Samuel (Ed.), The Niger-Congo Languages, pp. 81-104.

External links

• Linguisitic and folklore material from Kujamaat Joola
• UCLA page on Wolof
• Ethnologue report for Atlantic