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Ida Caroline Ward (1880 – 1949) was a British linguist working mainly on
African languagesThere are an estimated 2,000 languages spoken in Africa. The American linguist Joseph Greenberg argued that they fall into six major linguistic families:*Afroasiatic stretches from North Africa to the Horn of Africa and Southwest Asia....
who did influential work in the domains of
phonologyPhonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system...
and tonology. Her 1933 collaboration with
Diedrich Hermann WestermannDiedrich Hermann Westermann was a German missionary, Africanist, and linguist. He substantially extended and revised the work of Carl Meinhof, his teacher, although he rejected some of Meinhof's theories only implicitly...
,
Practical Phonetics for Students of African languages, was reprinted many times. African languages she worked on include Efik (1933),
IgboIgbo is a language spoken by some 18 million mainly Igbo people in southeastern Nigeria, in the region once identified as Biafra and parts of the Niger Delta. The language was used by John Goldsmith as an example to justify deviating from the classical linear model of phonology as laid out in The...
(1936, 1941),
MendeMende is a major language of Sierra Leone, with some speakers in neighboring Liberia. It is spoken both by the Mende people and by other ethnic groups as a regional lingua franca in southern Sierra Leone....
(1944), and
YorubaYoruba is a dialect continuum of West Africa with over 25 million speakers. The native tongue of the approximately 28 million Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and traces of it are found among communities in Brazil, Sierra Leone , northern Ghana Yoruba...
(published posthumously in 1952).
Works
- Ward, Ida C. (1933) The phonetic and tonal structure of Efik. Cambridge: Heffer.
- Ward, Ida C. (1936) An introduction to the Ibo language. Cambridge: Heffer.
- Ward, Ida C. (1937) Practical suggestions for the learning of an African language in the field, Africa, supplement, vol. 10, no. 2. London.
- Ward, Ida C. (1941) Ibo dialects and the development of a common language. Cambridge: Heffer.
- Ward, Ida C. (1944) 'A phonetic introduction to Mende', in Crosby, K.H., An introduction to the study of Mende. Cambridge: Heffer.
- Ward, Ida C. (1952) An introduction to the Yoruba language. Cambridge: Heffer & Sons.
- Westermann, Diedrich Hermann & Ward, Ida C. (1933) Practical phonetics for students of African languages. London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute.