Languages of Africa

Cultural phylogeography of the Bantu Languages of sub-Saharan Africa.

There is disagreement about the routes taken by populations speaking Bantu languages as they expanded to cover much of sub-Saharan Africa. Here, we build phylogenetic trees of Bantu languages and map them onto geographical space in order to assess the likely pathway of expansion and test between dispersal scenarios. The results clearly support a scenario in which groups first moved south throug...

Mathematics Registers in Indigenous Languages: Experiences from South Africa

Through reporting on an initiative in South Africa that aimed to provide epistemological access to teachers and learners of mathematics (and science) through translating mathematical concepts into two indigenous languages, this paper argues for the urgent development of mathematical registers in indigenous languages for mathematics and science. The pilot research reported on in this paper indic...

Iranian Languages as Gardens

typology of iranian languages

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Coevolution of Phonology and the Lexicon in Twelve Languages of West Africa

Synergetic models of language structure predict that the length of a word will depend upon various parameters such as its frequency and the number of phonemes in the language. This prediction has been used to explain word length differences within languages, but less often to explain the differences between languages. Here I show that average word length across 12 West African languages is rela...