African language dynamics between Macro-Sudan Belt and Niger-Congo: In commemoration of Diedrich Westermann’s legacy

Authors

Tom Güldemann (ed)
Jakob Lesage (ed)

Synopsis

A central problem in the linguistic history of Africa is how to distinguish patterns inherited genealogically from those that result from language contact and areal convergence. This question is particularly pertinent to West and Central Africa south of the Sahara, especially in relation to the Macro-Sudan Belt and the Niger-Congo family. This collection of articles approaches this problem across a variety of linguistic features, methods, and language groups, including Niger-Congo as a whole, Mande, Chadic, Central Sudanic, and the Gulf-of-Guinea creoles. The contributions range from phonological and morphosyntactic typology to historical reconstruction and genealogical classification. The volume features chapters that refine areal patterns, zoom in on smaller contact zones, reconstruct features to proto-languages, suggest mechanisms of contact-induced change, and in some cases introduce new methodologies for language classification and areal typology. The volume grew out of a workshop held in 2021 at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, which marked the centennial of Diedrich Westermann’s Berlin professorship, thereby linking a central concern of his oeuvre with the question at the heart of this volume – how to distinguish contact from inheritance.

Chapters

  • The Euro-African Transition Zone
    Findings from geospatial phonology
    Frederik Hartmann, Johanna Nichols
  • Phonological profile changes in the Macro-Sudan Belt
    Antagonism between ATR and interior vowels
    Florian Lionnet, Nicholas Rolle
  • STAMP morphs and non-pronominal STAMP in West Africa
    Typology and areal distributions
    Karee Garvin, Anna Macknick, Katherine Russell, Hannah Sande
  • Auxiliary verb constructions, STAMP morphs and related phenomena in the Chadic languages
    Gregory D. S. Anderson
  • How to become a Macro-Sudan Belt language
    The case of the Gulf-of-Guinea creoles
    Tom Güldemann, Tjerk Hagemeijer
  • Areal features in Wide Grassfields and beyond
    Roland Kießling
  • Areal micro-dynamics as a window onto Niger-Congo prehistory
    Jeff Good
  • The synchronic and diachronic diversity of adnominal gender-number marking in Niger-Congo
    Tom Güldemann, Ines Fiedler
  • Lexical evidence for Northern Atlantic groups as primary branches of Niger-Congo
    John T. M. Merrill
  • Alienability contrast in Mande
    Innovation or retention?
    Valentin Vydrin

Author Biographies

Tom Güldemann

Tom Güldemann is Professor of African Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research focuses on the documentation, description and comparison of African languages, linguistic typology, and historical linguistics, including genealogical classification, reconstruction and language contact. He has worked particularly on languages formerly subsumed under “Khoisan”, on Bantu and wider Niger-Congo, and on the areal and population history of Africa.

Jakob Lesage

Jakob Lesage is a research associate in African Languages at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research focuses on language documentation and description, typology and historical-comparative linguistics, with a particular emphasis on minority and endangered languages of Nigeria. He has written a grammar and published an extensive documentation collection of Kam, a Niger-Congo isolate in central eastern Nigeria, and has also contributed to large-scale comparative and typological research, including the Grambank project.

References

book cover

Published

September 14, 2026

Series

Niger-Congo Comparative Studies

Print ISSN

2627-0048
Copyright (c) 2026 Tom Güldemann, Jakob Lesage; Frederik Hartmann, Johanna Nichols, Florian Lionnet, Nicholas Rolle, Karee Garvin, Anna Macknick, Katherine Russell, Hannah Sande, Gregory D. S. Anderson, Tjerk Hagemeijer, Roland Kießling, Jeff Good, Ines Fiedler, John T. M. Merrill, Valentin Vydrin

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.