The contribution of African languages to linguistics

Each month, a topical scientific subject is explored by a researcher from the Collège de France.

Is there such a thing as the universality of human language ? By decentralizing the way linguistics looks at itself, the study of African languages is renewing the concepts of a science that has long remained Western.
Interview with Paul Roger ^Bassong*, linguist at the Collège de France.

As part of the cartographic program of generative grammar, the work of linguist Paul Roger Bassong is part of an intellectual enterprise aimed at making the internal structures of natural language visible. In contrast to a purely descriptive or geographical conception, linguistic cartography consists in inventorying the syntactic, morphological and semantic properties of these structures. This undertaking ties in directly with the theories developed since the 1950s by Noam Chomsky, and more specifically with the " cartographique " program, which aims to model the fine structure of natural languages based on the general principles of language. In this context, African languages offer exceptionally rich material.

The Bantu language family comprises almost four hundred languages spoken in an area stretching from sub-Saharan Africa to South Africa. Although their speakers are estimated at three one hundred ten million, Bantu languages are often neglected in the major corpora of formal linguistics. Yet here, they appear to be empirical fields with great theoretical potential. " Certain syntactic properties, postulated abstractly from European languages such as Italian or French, are expressed explicitly using specific markers in certain African languages ", explains Paul Roger Bassong. In Bantu languages, for example, linguists observe syntactic phenomena concerning word order that are only prosodic in French or Italian, where they only concern intonation, rhythm or accentuation.

The project's theoretical contribution is based on this type of data from the documentation of African languages. Far from being a simple exercise in descriptive collection, the mapping of African languages contributes to the formulation and refinement of general linguistic theories. " If a universal grammar is to be developed, generalizations must not be based exclusively on Indo-European languages ", insists the researcher.

Linguistic comparatism

Within the Bantu language family, Paul Roger Bassong identifies a strong morphosyntactic coherence that resists geographical dispersion. " More than four hundred languages share a series of common features, stemming from a history of human migrations from the Congo Basin to southern Africa ", he explains. One of the most emblematic features of these languages is their grammatical gender system, which is independent of biological sex. In Bantu languages, for example, " man and woman belong to the same grammatical gender, as they share an identical nominal prefix in the form of a consonant, vowel or syllable placed before the root of the noun ".

This regularity does not exclude variation. Some Bantu languages have partially lost the morphological markers of agreement, due to historical contacts with other language families. The linguist points out the difference between Basaá, a Bantu language from central Cameroon, and Limbum, a language in transition with Chadic. This comparison enables us to think of variation as an effect of historical recomposition. Linguistic typology is here enriched by phenomena of overlap, loss and reinvention, forcing linguistics to take account of the historical complexity of languages, not just their current structure.

The mapping project is based on a central principle of generative grammar, that of the universality of the faculty of language. " With the exception of very specific medical cases, we are all born to speak," asserts the researcher , "but the way in which languages structure this faculty varies. " This postulate implies a dual requirement. It makes it necessary to identify invariants, such as the presence of a subject in every complete sentence, and to map variations, such as the possibility of omitting the subject in Italian, but not in French. Comparatism thus becomes the tool par excellence of a linguistics concerned with epistemological balance. " We cannot build a valid linguistic theory on the basis of European languages alone ", insists Paul Roger Bassong, himself a native of Cameroon and speaker of Basaá. As more and more non-Western languages are taken into account, the concepts themselves are evolving. It is not diversity that threatens universality; on the contrary, it is through diversity that the universal becomes clearer.

One of the project's most significant contributions concerns the directionality of syntactic constituents. " Why does a syntactic element appear on the left in one language and on the right in another ? ", asks the linguist. Rather than postulating absolute rules, the idea is to account for these differences by principles of movement, from which surface structure is understood as the result of internal displacements. This type of questioning illustrates a fruitful tension between universality and linguistic diversity. In this sense, the study of African languages plays a key role in the reconfiguration of linguistics : " The more languages we discover, the more we question what we said before. Or we refine the theoretical tool ". A consideration that makes the preservation of language diversity in a globalized world more important than ever.

Political and scientific urgency

This theoretical ambition cannot do without patient fieldwork. As the majority of African languages are oral, documenting them is a matter of urgent patrimonial and scientific importance. In a context where colonial languages dominate educational and institutional systems, " there is an entire generation that no longer speaks Bantu languages due to a lack of intergenerational transmission ", notes Paul Roger Bassong. There is a dual risk of irremediable loss of linguistic structures and impoverishment of theorizing possibilities. To deal with this situation, the researcher combines transcription, recording, corpus collection, collaboration with native speakers - sometimes linguists themselves - and participation in international programs such as Langues et grammaires du monde in the French-speaking world. However, resources remain limited : " In Cameroon, research is more expensive than elsewhere. The terrain is difficult to access and funding is scarce. " These shortcomings severely restrict local research possibilities. The challenge is therefore also a political one. It's about creating the material conditions for decentralized knowledge, produced from the global South, using its own languages.

Throughout his career, from the University of Yaoundé to the Collège de France, the researcher embodies a figure of contemporary linguistic research who articulates theoretical rigor, local roots and international circulation. Collaborations with the CNRS in France, stays at the University of Potsdam in Germany, Rutgers University in the USA or the University of the Free State in South Africa, conferences in Berlin or Italy, it's from this mobility that a new linguistics is invented, less Eurocentric, more reflexive, and attentive to the thickness of linguistic data. In asserting that " the more languages we discover, the more we question or confirm what was said before ", Paul Roger Bassong is not content to defend an empirical approach. He advocates a linguistics in permanent transformation, whose categories of thought are indebted to the languages they seek to model. He defends the idea of a theoretical linguistics open to the margins, where Africa is no longer just a field of investigation, but a place of conceptual production. Documenting African languages is therefore not an ancillary or complementary gesture; it contributes to the re-founding of linguistics.

*Paul Roger Bassong is a researcher in linguistics at Pr Luigi Rizzi's General Linguistics Chair and a lecturer at the University of Yaoundé 1 in Cameroon.