This course is cross-listed with Linguistics and Black Studies.

This course is an introduction to the 2000+ languages of Africa and an introduction to the field of linguistics through African languages. The course provides an overview of the considerable diversity of African languages, surveying the social contexts in which African languages are used and the history of their development up to the present day. Core linguistic properties of African languages, including the types of sounds used and the structure of words and sentences, are also introduced and compared to English and other languages of the world.