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“The Galla of Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya speak a language of the eastern branch of the Cushitic language family, a sub-group of the Afro-Asiatic language family.”
[1]
[1]: (Lewis 2001, 19) Lewis, Herbert S. 2001. Jimma Abba Jifar, an Oromo Monarchy: Ethiopia, 1830-1932. Lawrenceville, New Jersey: The Red Sea Press. Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/NRZVWSCD/collection |
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“The Galla of Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya speak a language of the eastern branch of the Cushitic language family, a sub-group of the Afro-Asiatic language family.”
[1]
[1]: (Lewis 2001, 19) Lewis, Herbert S. 2001. Jimma Abba Jifar, an Oromo Monarchy: Ethiopia, 1830-1932. Lawrenceville, New Jersey: The Red Sea Press. Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/NRZVWSCD/collection |
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“The Galla of Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya speak a language of the eastern branch of the Cushitic language family, a sub-group of the Afro-Asiatic language family.”
[1]
[1]: (Lewis 2001, 19) Lewis, Herbert S. 2001. Jimma Abba Jifar, an Oromo Monarchy: Ethiopia, 1830-1932. Lawrenceville, New Jersey: The Red Sea Press. Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/NRZVWSCD/collection |
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WALS classification. “Many central Nigerian peoples have a tradition of an ancient migration ‘from Apa’, but in some of these cases, linguistic evidence makes a historic relationship very unlikely. The Idoma speak a Kwa language, related to Igala and Igbo, whereas Jukun is a Benue-Congo language. But Idoma ancestral chants sing of an ancestral home in Apa, in the Benue valley.”
[1]
“Many of the peoples of Guinea speak Kwa or Benue-Congo languages (and it is noteworthy that some scholars have questioned the dividing line between them). ‘The Kwa-speaking region is broadly identical with the yam belt. It includes Igbo, Igala, Idoma, Ijo, Yoruba, the Aja languages (Ewe, Fon and Gun) and the Akan languages. Deeply differentiated, they clearly reflect millennia of historical continuity.”
[2]
[1]: Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of African Societies to 1870. Cambridge University Press, 1997: 235. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/Z4GK27CI/collection [2]: Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of African Societies to 1870. Cambridge University Press, 1997: 244. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/Z4GK27CI/collection |
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“Today, there is a consensus that ASA [Ancient South Arabian] constitutes a group of related Central Semitic languages, namely Sabaic, Qatabanic, Minaic, and Hadramitic, so called by modern scholars after the names of the ancient kingdoms in which they were spoken. Although a case has been made for the existence of a fifth language, spoken in the kingdom of Himyar and corresponding to the ‘Himyar’ language referred to by medieval Arabic authors like al-Hamdani, who in fact claims that Himyari was still spoken in parts of Yemen in his own day, it is more likely that the Himyarites spoke a southern dialect of Sabaic in pre-Islamic times, and that what was known during the early Islamic period as Himyari represents the final stages of Sabaic.”
[1]
[1]: (Hatke 2019: 2) Hatke, G. 2019. The Other South Arabians: The Ancient South Arabian Kingdoms and Their MSA (Modern South Arabian) Neighbors, ca. 300 BCE-550 CE. In Hatke, G. and Ruzicka, R. (eds.) Ancient South Arabia through History: Kingdoms, Tribes, and Traders pp. 1-62. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/XKMAIRCX/library |
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The Seljuqs were Turkish speakers. Persian was used by the administration and at court, Arabic was also used alongside it.
[1]
Persian bureaucracy, Turkish military.
[2]
Seljuks "were a leading family of the Oghuz peoples (rendered Ghuzz by Muslim writers), a Turkish-speaking tribal federation."
[3]
[1]: Daniela Meneghini ’SALJUQS v. SALJUQID LITERATURE’ http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/saljuqs-v [2]: (Peacock 2015, 12) Peacock, A C S. 2015. The Great Seljuk Empire. Edinburgh University Press Ltd. Edinburgh. [3]: (Amitai 2006, 51) Amitai, Reuven. The Mamluk Institution, or One Thousand Years of Military Slavery in the Islamic World. Brown, Christopher Leslie. Morgan, Philip D. eds. 2006. Arming Slaves: From Classical To The Modern Age. Yale University Press. New Haven. |
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“Today, there is a consensus that ASA [Ancient South Arabian] constitutes a group of related Central Semitic languages, namely Sabaic, Qatabanic, Minaic, and Hadramitic, so called by modern scholars after the names of the ancient kingdoms in which they were spoken. Although a case has been made for the existence of a fifth language, spoken in the kingdom of Himyar and corresponding to the ‘Himyar’ language referred to by medieval Arabic authors like al-Hamdani, who in fact claims that Himyari was still spoken in parts of Yemen in his own day, it is more likely that the Himyarites spoke a southern dialect of Sabaic in pre-Islamic times, and that what was known during the early Islamic period as Himyari represents the final stages of Sabaic.”
[1]
[1]: (Hatke 2019: 2) Hatke, G. 2019. The Other South Arabians: The Ancient South Arabian Kingdoms and Their MSA (Modern South Arabian) Neighbors, ca. 300 BCE-550 CE. In Hatke, G. and Ruzicka, R. (eds.) Ancient South Arabia through History: Kingdoms, Tribes, and Traders pp. 1-62. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/XKMAIRCX/library |
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WALS classification. “As a consequence, their Nilo-Saharan language, Kanuri, became the lingua franca of the empire.”
[1]
[1]: Hiribarren, V. (2016). Kanem-Bornu Empire. In N. Dalziel & J. M. MacKenzie (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Empire (pp. 1–6). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.: 1–2. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/KNHK5ANQ/collection |
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WALS classification is Afro-Asiatic. “Hausa is considered a Chadic language. Today, Hausa speakers are estimated to total about 40 million. The language is primarily spoken in northern Nigeria and Niger, but can also be heard in neighboring countries such as Chad, Burkina Faso, northern Cameroon, Togo, Benin, and Ghana. Several dialects are used, for example, Kano and Sokoto, across northern Nigeria. Since the 17th century, Hausa has been written in a version of Arabic script called ajami that, like Arabic, is written and read left to right. Hausa is a tonal language, signifying that the meaning of a word depends on the high, medium, or low tone assigned to the vowels. The spellings of words, however, have not been standardized, and variations exist. Many of the written works in Hausa, especially prior to the mid-20th century, are based on Islamic themes.”
[1]
[1]: Falola, Toyin, and Ann Genova. Historical Dictionary of Nigeria. The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009: 149. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/SJAIVKDW/collection |
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“Hausa is considered a Chadic language. Today, Hausa speakers are estimated to total about 40 million. The language is primarily spoken in northern Nigeria and Niger, but can also be heard in neighboring countries such as Chad, Burkina Faso, northern Cameroon, Togo, Benin, and Ghana. Several dialects are used, for example, Kano and Sokoto, across northern Nigeria. Since the 17th century, Hausa has been written in a version of Arabic script called ajami that, like Arabic, is written and read left to right. Hausa is a tonal language, signifying that the meaning of a word depends on the high, medium, or low tone assigned to the vowels. The spellings of words, however, have not been standardized, and variations exist. Many of the written works in Hausa, especially prior to the mid-20th century, are based on Islamic themes.”
[1]
Glottolog classification for Arabic has Semitic as the linguisitic family.
[1]: Falola, Toyin, and Ann Genova. Historical Dictionary of Nigeria. The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009: 149. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/SJAIVKDW/collection |
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“Tamil, a member of the Dravidian family of languages, is the most important literary language of southern India. First written in Brāhmī-derived Grantha, it developed a script of its own, called tamiz euttu in Tamil. Although it shares a com- mon origin with Devanagari it differs from it significantly both in appearance and structure.”
[1]
[1]: (Coulmas 2002, 140). Coulmas, Florian. 2002. Writing Systems An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/7F5SEVNA/items/AHWVP84B/collection |
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Tamil is a Dravidian language, Sinhalese Indio-Aryan. "The island for the first time was divided into a Sinhala-speaking southeast and a Tamil-speaking northwest."
[1]
"The Yālppānavaipavamālai emphasizes that the kings had both Tamil and Sinhalese subjects, the latter sometimes rebellious."
[2]
[1]: (Peebles 2006: 27) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/7F5SEVNA/items/HJG4VBC5/collection. [2]: (Peebles 2006: 32) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/7F5SEVNA/items/HJG4VBC5/collection. |
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“It is an Indo-European language (associated with north Indian Prakrit branch) that evolved from the foundational Sinhala Prakrit (which was in use until the third century CE), to Proto-Sinhala (until the seventh century CE), medieval Sinhala (twelfth century CE), and modern Sinhala (twelfth century CE to the present).”
[1]
“Tamil, a member of the Dravidian family of languages, is the most important literary language of southern India. First written in Brāhmī-derived Grantha, it developed a script of its own, called tamiz euttu in Tamil. Although it shares a common origin with Devanagari it differs from it significantly both in appearance and structure.”
[2]
[1]: (Schug and Walimbe 2016, 582) Schug, Gwen Robbins, and Subhash R. Walimbe. 2016. A Companion to South Asia in the Past, 2016. Somerset: Wiley. Seshat URL:https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/7F5SEVNA/items/7MXIBSHQ/collection [2]: (Coulmas 2002, 140). Coulmas, Florian. 2002. Writing Systems An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/7F5SEVNA/items/AHWVP84B/collection |
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"However, this community of practice was not an ethnic nation. In fact, it was multilingual, encompassing several dialects of the Yorùbá language and the Bini (Edo) language, and it succeeded in absorbing the individuals and families from other cultural groups, such as the Nupe and Djerma, into its fold during the Classical period."
[1]
[1]: (Ogundiran 2020: 138) |
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Tamil is a Dravidian language, Sinhalese Indio-Aryan. "The island for the first time was divided into a Sinhala-speaking southeast and a Tamil-speaking northwest."
[1]
"The Yālppānavaipavamālai emphasizes that the kings had both Tamil and Sinhalese subjects, the latter sometimes rebellious."
[2]
[1]: (Peebles 2006: 27) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/7F5SEVNA/items/HJG4VBC5/collection. [2]: (Peebles 2006: 32) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/7F5SEVNA/items/HJG4VBC5/collection. |
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The Seljuqs were Turkish speakers. Persian was used by the administration and at court, Arabic was also used alongside it.
[1]
Persian bureaucracy, Turkish military.
[2]
Seljuks "were a leading family of the Oghuz peoples (rendered Ghuzz by Muslim writers), a Turkish-speaking tribal federation."
[3]
[1]: Daniela Meneghini ’SALJUQS v. SALJUQID LITERATURE’ http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/saljuqs-v [2]: (Peacock 2015, 12) Peacock, A C S. 2015. The Great Seljuk Empire. Edinburgh University Press Ltd. Edinburgh. [3]: (Amitai 2006, 51) Amitai, Reuven. The Mamluk Institution, or One Thousand Years of Military Slavery in the Islamic World. Brown, Christopher Leslie. Morgan, Philip D. eds. 2006. Arming Slaves: From Classical To The Modern Age. Yale University Press. New Haven. |
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“‘Gothic’ was probably the military pidgin cant of the Mediterranean armies, a mix of Greek, Latin, and Germanic elements, the product of the intermingling of soldiers of diverse backgrounds in the 5th and 6th centuries. It should not be thought of as widely known or as the primary language of the people our sources call Goths. Latin held that distinction, a language known by all inhabitants of Italy regardless of origin.113 This can be inferred because the sources never indicate that communication was a problem. Liberius is not known to have spoken Gothic, but had no trouble leading troops. Many of Cassiodorus’ letters are addressed to people with Germanic names and they were written in Latin.”
[1]
[1]: (Swain 2016: 223) Swain, B. 2016. Goths and Gothic Identity in the Ostrogothic Kingdom. In Arnold, Bjornlie and Sessa (eds) A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy pp. 203-233. Brill. Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/87H7UDXS/item-list |
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c582 CE: "The First Turkic Khaganate officially split into the Western and the Eastern Turkic Khaganate. In the Eastern Turkic Khaganate, the Sogdian language and script was used for chancellery purposes and inscriptions."
[1]
"The great Sogdian urban centers certainly remained Iranian-speaking, as did the countryside, but in certain remote regions the Türk element began to be ethnically important (as in the mountains of ’à‘, in Tukharistan and in Semire‘’e) even if it was culturally under Sogdian domination (the overstrikes on the coins of Tukharistan under Türk control were in Sogdian)."
[2]
[1]: (Hosszú 2012, 285) Hosszú, G. 2012. Heritage of Scribes: The Relation of Rovas Scripts to Eurasian Writing Systems. Rovas Foundation. [2]: (De la Vaissière 2005, 202) |
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"Alexander had apparently hellenized Susa to the extent that the language of administration was Greek, the form of city-state government was Greek, and even the ethnic composition of the area was partially Greek."
[1]
[1]: (Wenke 1981, 306) Wenke, Robert J. 1981. Elymeans, Parthians, and the Evolution of Empires in Southwestern Iran. Journal of the American Oriental Society. Vol. 101. No. 3. Jul-Sep. American Oriental Society. pp. 303-315. http://www.jstor.org/stable/602592 |
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“It is an Indo-European language (associated with north Indian Prakrit branch) that evolved from the foundational Sinhala Prakrit (which was in use until the third century CE), to Proto-Sinhala (until the seventh century CE), medieval Sinhala (twelfth century CE), and modern Sinhala (twelfth century CE to the present).”
[1]
[1]: (Schug and Walimbe 2016, 582) Schug, Gwen Robbins, and Subhash R. Walimbe. 2016. A Companion to South Asia in the Past, 2016. Somerset: Wiley. Seshat URL:https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/7F5SEVNA/items/7MXIBSHQ/collection |
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“It is an Indo-European language (associated with north Indian Prakrit branch) that evolved from the foundational Sinhala Prakrit (which was in use until the third century CE), to Proto-Sinhala (until the seventh century CE), medieval Sinhala (twelfth century CE), and modern Sinhala (twelfth century CE to the present).”
[1]
“Tamil, a member of the Dravidian family of languages, is the most important literary language of southern India. First written in Brāhmī-derived Grantha, it developed a script of its own, called tamiz euttu in Tamil. Although it shares a common origin with Devanagari it differs from it significantly both in appearance and structure.”
[2]
[1]: (Schug and Walimbe 2016, 582) Schug, Gwen Robbins, and Subhash R. Walimbe. 2016. A Companion to South Asia in the Past, 2016. Somerset: Wiley. Seshat URL:https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/7F5SEVNA/items/7MXIBSHQ/collection [2]: (Coulmas 2002, 140). Coulmas, Florian. 2002. Writing Systems An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/7F5SEVNA/items/AHWVP84B/collection |
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“It is an Indo-European language (associated with north Indian Prakrit branch) that evolved from the foundational Sinhala Prakrit (which was in use until the third century CE), to Proto-Sinhala (until the seventh century CE), medieval Sinhala (twelfth century CE), and modern Sinhala (twelfth century CE to the present).”
[1]
[1]: (Schug and Walimbe 2016, 582) Schug, Gwen Robbins, and Subhash R. Walimbe. 2016. A Companion to South Asia in the Past, 2016. Somerset: Wiley. Seshat URL:https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/7F5SEVNA/items/7MXIBSHQ/collection |
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“It is an Indo-European language (associated with north Indian Prakrit branch) that evolved from the foundational Sinhala Prakrit (which was in use until the third century CE), to Proto-Sinhala (until the seventh century CE), medieval Sinhala (twelfth century CE), and modern Sinhala (twelfth century CE to the present).”
[1]
[1]: (Schug and Walimbe 2016, 582) Schug, Gwen Robbins, and Subhash R. Walimbe. 2016. A Companion to South Asia in the Past, 2016. Somerset: Wiley. Seshat URL:https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/7F5SEVNA/items/7MXIBSHQ/collection |
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The Indus script has not yet been deciphered by linguists: "The nature and content of the Indus script has been extensively debated in the literature. More than a hundred attempts have been made to assign meanings to various signs and sign combinations, relating it to proto-Dravidian language (see Parpola 2009, 1994, Mahadevan 1998) on the one hand and to Sanskrit (Rao 1982) on the other. It has even been suggested that the script is entirely numeric (Subbarayappa 1997). However, no consistent and generally agreed interpretation exists and most interpretations are at variance with each other and, at times, internally inconsistent (Possehl 1996)."
[1]
There were almost certainly a wide range of languages spoken, perhaps including one (or several) from an ancient language family known as ’Proto-Dravidian’.
[2]
[3]
"Para-Munda, spoken in the Punjab at the time when the Rigvedic Aryans arrived and seemingly also by the Late Harappan settlers who were moving eastward into the Ganges region, must have been in the subcontinent for a considerable period. If the area where it was spoken in the Pre-Harappan period included the Indo-Iranian borderlands, then it is likely that Para-Munda was the main Harappan language, at least in the Punjab and probably throughout the civilization, and that Dravidian was a language spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of the west, possibly as far northwest as Saurashtra. In this case the language of the PostHarappans in Gujarat may have developed into the North Dravidian branch.//Alternatively Para-Munda may have been the language spoken by the hunter-gatherer-fisher communities that inhabited the Indus region before the people of the borderlands settled in the plains. If the newcomers to the region in the fifth millennium were Dravidian speakers, then it is possible that a Dravidian language was spoken by at least some of the farmers and pastoralists of the borderlands who settled in the plains and therefore by some Harappans but that Para-Munda remained the main language of many Harappan inhabitants of the Punjab.Studies of the Harappan script indicate that it was used to write a single language. It seems plausible that the overarching cultural unity of the Harappans would be matched by the existence of an official language, used in writing and spoken as a lingua franca throughout the Harappan realms. Nevertheless, it is quite possible that one or several other languages were also spoken in the Harappan state, specific to different regions or occupational groups, reflecting the different communities that had come together in its formation. Prolonged bilingualism is known to have occurred in other areas, for example in Mesopotamia where Sumerian and Akkadian coexisted for many centuries: though they belonged originally to the south and north parts of southern Mesopotamia (Sumer and Akkad), educated people from both regions spoke both languages."
[4]
[1]: (Yadav and Vahia 2011, 3) Nisha Yadav and M.N. Vahia. 2011. Indus Script: A Study of its Sign Design. SCRIPTA 3: 1-36. [2]: Possehl, Gregory L., ‘The Transformation of the Indus Civilization’, Journal of World Prehistory, 11 (1997): 462 [3]: Gregory L. Possehl. The Indus Civilization. A Contemporary Perspective. Walnut Creek, Altamira, 2002, p.248 [4]: (McIntosh 2008 page 2355-356) Jane McIntosh. 2008. The Ancient Indus Valley. Santa Barbara; Denver; Oxford: ABC-CLIO. |
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WALS classification.
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This applies to Edo and the other main languages present, such as Igbo/Ibo & Yoruba. Ijo/Ijaw is Ijoid. Itsekiri is not on WALS.
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WALS classification is Niger-Congo, though some sources suggest Benue-Congo. “[T]he Jukun speak a Benue-Congo language,with its linguistic relatives in central Nigeria and the Cross River area”
[1]
“Many central Nigerian peoples have a tradition of an ancient migration ‘from Apa’, but in some of these cases, linguistic evidence makes a historic relationship very unlikely. The Idoma speak a Kwa language, related to Igala and Igbo, whereas Jukun is a Benue-Congo language.”
[1]
“According to K.Williamson, the Jukun belong to the Niger-Congo group of languages whose homeland, proto-language and primary dispersal centre all fall within the area of Nigeria.”
[2]
[1]: Isichei, E. (1997). A History of African Societies to 1870. Cambridge University Press: 235. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/Z4GK27CI/collection [2]: Zhema, S. (2017). A History of the Social and Political Organization of the Jukun of Wukari Division, c.1596–1960 [Benue State University]: 60. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/U667CC36/collection |
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WALS classification. “Linguistically, the Igbo belong to the Kwa sub-family of the Niger-Congo languages. Socio-culturally and linguistically, the Igbo could be further divided into four groups: the northern Igbo, the western Igbo, the north-eastern Igbo and the eastern Igbo.”
[1]
[1]: Ejidike, O. M. (1999). Human Rights in the Cultural Traditions and Social Practice of the Igbo of South-Eastern Nigeria. Journal of African Law, 43(1), 71–98: 74. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/7CMJSBJH/collection |
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WALS classification.
|
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WALS classification is Niger-Congo, though some sources suggest Benue-Congo. “[T]he Jukun speak a Benue-Congo language, with its linguistic relatives in central Nigeria and the Cross River area”
[1]
“Many central Nigerian peoples have a tradition of an ancient migration ‘from Apa’, but in some of these cases, linguistic evidence makes a historic relationship very unlikely. The Idoma speak a Kwa language, related to Igala and Igbo, whereas Jukun is a Benue-Congo language.”
[1]
“According to K.Williamson, the Jukun belong to the Niger-Congo group of languages whose homeland, proto-language and primary dispersal centre all fall within the area of Nigeria.”
[2]
[1]: Isichei, E. (1997). A History of African Societies to 1870. Cambridge University Press: 235. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/Z4GK27CI/collection [2]: Zhema, S. (2017). A History of the Social and Political Organization of the Jukun of Wukari Division, c.1596–1960 [Benue State University]: 60. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/U667CC36/collection |
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WALS gives Niger-Congo as the family for Ajagbe and Yoruba.
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WALS classification.
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WALS classification.
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WALS classification. “Many central Nigerian peoples have a tradition of an ancient migration ‘from Apa’, but in some of these cases, linguistic evidence makes a historic relationship very unlikely. The Idoma speak a Kwa language, related to Igala and Igbo, whereas Jukun is a Benue-Congo language. But Idoma ancestral chants sing of an ancestral home in Apa, in the Benue valley.”
[1]
“Many of the peoples of Guinea speak Kwa or Benue-Congo languages (and it is noteworthy that some scholars have questioned the dividing line between them). ‘The Kwa-speaking region is broadly identical with the yam belt. It includes Igbo, Igala, Idoma, Ijo, Yoruba, the Aja languages (Ewe, Fon and Gun) and the Akan languages. Deeply differentiated, they clearly reflect millennia of historical continuity.”
[2]
[1]: Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of African Societies to 1870. Cambridge University Press, 1997: 235. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/Z4GK27CI/collection [2]: Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of African Societies to 1870. Cambridge University Press, 1997: 244. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/Z4GK27CI/collection |
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NB The following quote refers to the Late Stone Age predecessors of this quasipolity. "Over the next one thousand years, the descendants of these migrants from the dry grassland developed a new branch of the proto-Niger-Congo language. Today, we call these pioneer farmers in the guinea savanna the proto-Benue-Kwa speakers."
[1]
[1]: (Ogundiran 2020: 35) |
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WALS classification. “As a consequence, their Nilo-Saharan language, Kanuri, became the lingua franca of the empire.”
[1]
[1]: Hiribarren, V. (2016). Kanem-Bornu Empire. In N. Dalziel & J. M. MacKenzie (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Empire (pp. 1–6). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.: 1–2. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/KNHK5ANQ/collection |
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“Hausa is considered a Chadic language. Today, Hausa speakers are estimated to total about 40 million. The language is primarily spoken in northern Nigeria and Niger, but can also be heard in neighboring countries such as Chad, Burkina Faso, northern Cameroon, Togo, Benin, and Ghana. Several dialects are used, for example, Kano and Sokoto, across northern Nigeria. Since the 17th century, Hausa has been written in a version of Arabic script called ajami that, like Arabic, is written and read left to right. Hausa is a tonal language, signifying that the meaning of a word depends on the high, medium, or low tone assigned to the vowels. The spellings of words, however, have not been standardized, and variations exist. Many of the written works in Hausa, especially prior to the mid-20th century, are based on Islamic themes.”
[1]
Glottolog classification for Arabic has Semitic as the linguisitic family.
[1]: Falola, Toyin, and Ann Genova. Historical Dictionary of Nigeria. The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009: 149. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/SJAIVKDW/collection |
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"However, this community of practice was not an ethnic nation. In fact, it was multilingual, encompassing several dialects of the Yorùbá language and the Bini (Edo) language, and it succeeded in absorbing the individuals and families from other cultural groups, such as the Nupe and Djerma, into its fold during the Classical period."
[1]
[1]: (Ogundiran 2020: 138) |
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The Indus script has not yet been deciphered by linguists: "The nature and content of the Indus script has been extensively debated in the literature. More than a hundred attempts have been made to assign meanings to various signs and sign combinations, relating it to proto-Dravidian language (see Parpola 2009, 1994, Mahadevan 1998) on the one hand and to Sanskrit (Rao 1982) on the other. It has even been suggested that the script is entirely numeric (Subbarayappa 1997). However, no consistent and generally agreed interpretation exists and most interpretations are at variance with each other and, at times, internally inconsistent (Possehl 1996)."
[1]
There were almost certainly a wide range of languages spoken, perhaps including one (or several) from an ancient language family known as ’Proto-Dravidian’.
[2]
[3]
"Para-Munda, spoken in the Punjab at the time when the Rigvedic Aryans arrived and seemingly also by the Late Harappan settlers who were moving eastward into the Ganges region, must have been in the subcontinent for a considerable period. If the area where it was spoken in the Pre-Harappan period included the Indo-Iranian borderlands, then it is likely that Para-Munda was the main Harappan language, at least in the Punjab and probably throughout the civilization, and that Dravidian was a language spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of the west, possibly as far northwest as Saurashtra. In this case the language of the PostHarappans in Gujarat may have developed into the North Dravidian branch.//Alternatively Para-Munda may have been the language spoken by the hunter-gatherer-fisher communities that inhabited the Indus region before the people of the borderlands settled in the plains. If the newcomers to the region in the fifth millennium were Dravidian speakers, then it is possible that a Dravidian language was spoken by at least some of the farmers and pastoralists of the borderlands who settled in the plains and therefore by some Harappans but that Para-Munda remained the main language of many Harappan inhabitants of the Punjab.Studies of the Harappan script indicate that it was used to write a single language. It seems plausible that the overarching cultural unity of the Harappans would be matched by the existence of an official language, used in writing and spoken as a lingua franca throughout the Harappan realms. Nevertheless, it is quite possible that one or several other languages were also spoken in the Harappan state, specific to different regions or occupational groups, reflecting the different communities that had come together in its formation. Prolonged bilingualism is known to have occurred in other areas, for example in Mesopotamia where Sumerian and Akkadian coexisted for many centuries: though they belonged originally to the south and north parts of southern Mesopotamia (Sumer and Akkad), educated people from both regions spoke both languages."
[4]
[1]: (Yadav and Vahia 2011, 3) Nisha Yadav and M.N. Vahia. 2011. Indus Script: A Study of its Sign Design. SCRIPTA 3: 1-36. [2]: Possehl, Gregory L., ‘The Transformation of the Indus Civilization’, Journal of World Prehistory, 11 (1997): 462 [3]: Gregory L. Possehl. The Indus Civilization. A Contemporary Perspective. Walnut Creek, Altamira, 2002, p.248 [4]: (McIntosh 2008 page 2355-356) Jane McIntosh. 2008. The Ancient Indus Valley. Santa Barbara; Denver; Oxford: ABC-CLIO. |
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