Areal Linguistic Features of Africa

The distribution of linguistic features can tell us much about the interaction of linguistic communities, and the historical relationship between languages and people groups. Together with a team of linguists at UC Berkeley and elsewhere, I am working to create a database of linguistic features, syntactic, morphological, and phonological, in languages throughout Africa. Past work focused on the distribution of certain tonal and word order features in Africa. Current work focuses on implosives and so-called STAMP morphs in the Macro-Sudan Belt. As part of this project (ALFA), I have collaborated with linguists and computer scientists to create an online mapping software, which plots the languages in our database on a map, pulling latitude and longitude, as well as language family information from glottolog. The result is a straightforward way to visualize the distribution of linguistic features.