The Oxford Guide to the Atlantic Languages of West Africa

This volume presents the first book-length overview of the Atlantic languages, a small family of languages spoken mainly on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. Languages in this area have been used in diverse multilingual societies with intense language contact for the whole of their known history, and their genealogical relatedness and the impact of language contact on their lexicon and grammar have been widely debated.

The book is divided into four parts. The first provides an introduction to language ecologies in the area and includes two accounts of the genealogical classification of Atlantic languages. Chapters in the second part offer grammatical overviews of individual languages, including the most important non-Atlantic contact languages (Casamance Creole and Mandinka), while the third part explores Atlantic languages from a typological perspective, with chapters that explore formal and semantic aspects of their nominal classification systems, nominalization strategies, their rich system of verbal extensions, and the stem-initial consonant mutation that is attested in a subset of languages. The final part of the book investigates Atlantic languages in their social environments, including the creation of creole identities, secret languages, Ajami writing practices, language acquisition, the spread and use of Fula as a lingua franca, digital language practices, and language ideologies.

The volume is an essential tool for linguists interested in the languages of West Africa, language history and classification, patterns of language use in Atlantic societies, and typology and language contact more broadly.

Friederike Lüpke, Professor of African Studies, University of Helsinki

Friederike Lüpke is Professor of African Studies at the University of Helsinki and Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. She studied African linguistics in Cologne and Paris and held a PhD scholarship in the Language and Cognition Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. Geographically grounded in West Africa, her research centres on the description of Mande and Atlantic languages in their multilingual societal contexts, including research on literacy and writing and inclusive multilingual education. She is a leading scholar in the emerging field of small-scale multilingualism studies.