アフリカ諸語研究の問題点

抄録

More than six hundred African languages (mostly tribal languages) have been hitherto reported and examined by Europeans, some of whom tried the classification of those tribal languages based on either regional or linguistic similarities. But any classification presented by them does not prove to be final, partly because regional similarities can not be wholly depended upon particularly in Africa where various tribes have been constantly moving and mixing without having influence on each other and without forming local colour, and partly because linguistic similarities can not be also wholly depended upon in case that those similarities are not justified by means of tracing the movement in the past of the related tribes and thus lined with historical facts. It is possible that the two tribal languages located side by side and regarded similar in respect of syntax or grammar never belong in reality to the same language family, and so those classifications based on either legional or linguistic similarities can not be more than hypothetic.
Though this sort of hypothesis is useful, I agree, not only to the linguistic but also to the historical research, I am afraid it can not be duly adapted to the present-day African languages now having the role as the languages in the societies: in the past time when the tribes were isolated from each other the tribal languages were used only in the limit of separate tribes, but now when the tribes are incorporated into society —either rural or urban, local or national—, they are used in the society composed of several tribes. To clarify the structure of such a complex language society, the above-mentioned traditional classification seems unsatisfactory, and some new method of grouping, maybe sociological and phenomenal, is required.
The present language society in Africa has three coexisting attributes, that is tribal, local, and national. By those three qualifiers I mean tribal language, lingua franca developed from some tribal language, and European language once used by colonial governor, and ofthose three regions —tribe residence, local society and nation— the secondseems to be the most important, as this region has a unity guaranteed by the former kingdom so proudly reminded by the natives and it is not so artificial as the nation. For the most part the present nations in Africa lack the unity and they are rather federal from the cultural point of view.
Though the regions covered by such lingua franca as Swahili, Hausa, Lingala, etc. have, to a certain degree, the unity not solely linguistic but geographical, historical, economical, the importance of the component tribal languages in those regions can not be negligible. A lingua franca and a tribal language have their roles separately, and these roles correspond to the structure of such local region determined by the whole history of the component tribes. This structure or the layers due to those tribal activities is just the research object of linguistic sociology, which I am going to apply to the region around Stanley Pool in Bas Congo.
This method of grouping African languages may be too phenomenal, but I believe it is more efficient to understand present-day Africa as it is. Moreover I never deny a contribution the traditional classification will make to such a grouping of African languages.