Inheritance, Contact, and Change in Two East African Languages

Dr. Derek Nurse

Dr. Derek Nurse, Linguistics, recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, continues to cement his reputation as one of the world’s foremost scholars of African languages. His newest work explores the relationship and development of Ilwana, spoken in Kenya by about 25,000 people, and Daiso, spoken in Tanzania by about 8000. There are two main views of language development — that they evolve in “pristine solitude,” as Dr. Nurse puts it, or that they are influenced by other languages. The borrowing of words from other languages is a minor part of the evolution. “Languages absorb not just words,” said Dr. Nurse. “Sounds, structures, sentence shapes — all these can be adopted by other languages.”

Dr. Nurse received a SSHRC grant in the early 1990s, and travelled to Africa to do his fieldwork. He took the languages apart — the words, the sounds used to make them, how words are formed, and sentence structures. Through a painstaking deductive process, he documented when and how the languages underwent major change. Neither language has written history, so it is hard to pinpoint dates of change, but “There is good reason to think the changes in Daiso occurred between 1600 and 1900,” Dr. Nurse said.

In about 1600, a Daiso community migrated to Tanzania from Kenya. The first (German) description was written around 1900, showing the new language in much its current form. At the same time a Cushitic group from Ethiopia settled around the Ilwana and influenced them massively.

By the early 1900s, the languages had changed to more or less today’s form. Both are threatened languages; as young people leave their areas and older people die, the number of speakers diminish.

Inheritance, Contact, and Change in Two East African Languages is published by Rudiger Koppe Verlag.