Subjected words: African linguistics and the colonial encounter

The systematic study of African languages emerged in the 19th century as a scientific field along with other European projects of information-gathering, religious proselytizing, and establishing an imperial presence on the continent. This paper considers how the conditions – ideological, social, and material – of linguistic research in the early colonial encounter influenced the resulting descriptions of African languages and the delimitation of linguistic boundaries. Frameworks and precedents from those early projects have remained influential in African linguistics, for example in the identification of ‘ethnolinguistic groups,’ in the shape of grammatical descriptions, and in the politics of orthography.