Polyglotta Africana is a study written by the German missionary Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle in 1854 in which he compared 156
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....
(or about 120 according to today's classification; several varieties considered distinct by Koelle were later shown to belong to the same language). As a comparative study it was a major breakthrough at the time.
Koelle based his material on first hand observations, mostly with freed slaves in
FreetownFreetown is the capital and largest city of Sierra Leone. It is a major port city on the Atlantic Ocean located in the Western Area of the country and with a population of 1,070,200. The city is the economic and financial center of Sierra Leone...
,
Sierra LeoneSierra Leone , officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Guinea in the north, Liberia in the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean in the southwest. Sierra Leone covers a total area of and has a population estimated at 6.4 million...
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Polyglotta Africana is a study written by the German missionary Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle in 1854 in which he compared 156
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....
(or about 120 according to today's classification; several varieties considered distinct by Koelle were later shown to belong to the same language). As a comparative study it was a major breakthrough at the time.
Koelle based his material on first hand observations, mostly with freed slaves in
FreetownFreetown is the capital and largest city of Sierra Leone. It is a major port city on the Atlantic Ocean located in the Western Area of the country and with a population of 1,070,200. The city is the economic and financial center of Sierra Leone...
,
Sierra LeoneSierra Leone , officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Guinea in the north, Liberia in the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean in the southwest. Sierra Leone covers a total area of and has a population estimated at 6.4 million...
. He transcribed the data using a uniform phonetic script devised by the Egyptologist Lepsius. Koelle's transcriptions were not always accurate; for example, he persistently confused with and with . His data were consistent enough, however, to enable groupings of languages based on vocabulary resemblances. Notably, the groups which he set up correspond in a number of cases to modern groups:
- North-West Atlantic — Atlantic
The Atlantic or West Atlantic languages of West Africa are a proposed major group of Niger-Congo language family. The Atlantic languages are highly diverse and have never been demonstrated to form a unified group, so that linguists such as Dimmendahl and Blench treat them as three independent...
- North-Western High Sudan/Mandenga — Mande
The Mande languages are spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé people and include Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Bissa, Dioula, Kagoro, Bozo, Mende, Susu, Yacouba, Vai, and Ligbi...
- North-Eastern High Sudan — Gur
The Gur languages, also known as Central Gur, belong to the Niger-Congo languages. There are about 70 languages belonging to this group. They are spoken in Burkina Faso, southern Mali, northeastern Côte d'Ivoire, northern Ghana, northern Togo, northwestern Benin, and southwestern Niger.Like most...