ISBN:
9780191795398
Language:
English
Pages:
1 Online-Ressource (cii, 1307 Seiten)
,
Illustrationen, Karten
Series Statement:
Oxford handbooks online
Series Statement:
Linguistics
Parallel Title:
Erscheint auch als The Oxford handbook of Ethiopian languages
DDC:
492.8
Keywords:
Ethiopian languages
;
Ethiopian languages
;
Language
;
Language teaching & learning
;
Ethiopian languages
;
Essays
;
Aufsatzsammlung
Abstract:
This handbook provides a comprehensive account of the languages spoken in Ethiopia, exploring their structures and their function and use in society. It offers overviews of individual languages, many of them less documented, as well as detailed studies of specific aspects of language use in Ethiopia.
Abstract:
"Ethiopia - a country in the Horn of Africa - hosts about 100 million people speaking more than eighty languages belonging to the Cushitic, Omotic, Nilo-Saharan, and Semitic languages families (CSA 2013: 28; Meyer & Richter 2003: 23-29; Eberhard, Simons & Fennig 2019). Speakers of these languages have been in contact for a long time resulting in widespread bi- and multilingualism and in the creation of regional and national lingua francas. Eventually, this situation yielded the Ethiopian Linguistic Area whose features are still open for ongoing discussion (see Crass & Meyer 2008). In 1991, the Ethiopian government established a policy promoting the use of all Ethiopian languages in primary education and local administration. Since then, research on Ethiopian languages has experienced an unprecedented expansion and has become a major field of study for the new generation of Ethiopian linguists (see Bulakh et al. 2019: 98-106). Despite the remarkable amount of research on individual Ethiopian languages, language groups and sociolinguistic topics over the last few decades, the most frequently cited general reference works on Ethiopian languages and linguistics still remain Bender et al. (1976a) and Bender (1976a), which obviously no longer represent the state of the art. These two works have remained easily available in Ethiopia and beyond over the last forty years, and are written in a very accessible descriptive-linguistic style so they are also frequently used by students of Ethiopian linguistics. Moreover, they combine information on sociolinguistic, historical linguistic, and applied linguistic issues with basic linguistic descriptions of Ethiopian languages. More recent handbooks, such as Kaye (1997; 2007), Hetzron (1997) or its second edition by Huehnergard & Pat-El (2019), and Weninger (2011a), focus only on Semitic languages, and thus lack information on the other language families found in Ethiopia. The Encyclopedia Aethiopica (Uhlig & Bausi 2003-2014) - the most up-to-date general reference work on Ethiopia - also contains information on Ethiopian languages but usually only in the form of very brief, fairly standardized entries that provide basic information on the phonology, morphology and syntax. Handbooks on African languages like Heine et al. (1981), Heine & Nurse (2000; 2008), Güldemann (2018), and Wolff (2019) also deal with various Ethiopian languages but do not provide a comprehensive description of them and their subgroups. Edzard (2012) and Frajzyngier & Shay (2012) deal with genetic and typological aspects of Afroasiatic and its major groups; Edzard (2012) also contains short grammatical descriptions of a very few languages. However, the language descriptions are very selective, and information on sociolinguistic issues is inadequate"--
Note:
Also issued in print: 2023. - Includes bibliographical references and index. - Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed on May 23, 2023)
DOI:
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198728542.001.0001
URL:
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