The Oxford Handbook of African Languages

This book provides a comprehensive overview of current research in African languages, drawing on insights from anthropological linguistics, typology, historical and comparative linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It covers a wide range of topics, from grammatical sketches of individual languages to sociocultural and extralinguistic issues.

Rainer Vossen is Professor Emeritus of African Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. He has published descriptive and comparative studies on Khoisan, Nilotic, Bantu, and Mande languages as well as on dialectological, sociolinguistic, and historical topics. His recent books include the edited volumes The Khoesan Languages (Routledge, 2013), and African Sociolinguistic and Sociocultural Studies (Rüdiger Köppe, 2014).


Gerrit J. Dimmendaal is Professor of African Studies at the University of Cologne. He has published descriptive and comparative studies on languages belonging to three different language families, Afroasiatic, Niger-Congo, and Nilo-Saharan, as well as on anthropological linguistics. His more recent monographs include Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages (Benjamins, 2011) and The Leopard's Spots: Essays on Language, Cognition and Culture (Brill, 2015).