ABSTRACT
At least 25 per cent of the world’s languages spoken today are situated in Africa, the
continent from which modern humans – and presumably human language – originated.
As a linguistic area, Africa is still characterized, not only by a large number of lan-
guages, but also by considerable genetic heterogeneity. According to a widely accepted
genetic classification of African languages, that of Greenberg (1963a), there are four
major phyla: Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo, and Nilo-Saharan. Greenberg’s views present a synthesis of more than a century of scholarly work in the area of
genetic classification. Though widely accepted, his classification has also led to some
reclassification; moreover, in a sequel to his seminal work it has been suggested that
there may be representatives of additional language families. The historical back-
ground to Greenberg’s scholarly work, as well as of studies by scholars following up
on his insights, is discussed below.
