Nicolas Quint

Principense is one of the four Gulf of Guinea Portuguese-based Creoles (GGPCs) - the other three being Saotomense, Angolar, and Annobonese - a language family for which the lack of accurate, detailed descriptions is particularly striking. Prior to the publication of this book, Gunther’s (1973) study – a serious but comparatively short work – was the main source of linguistic information on Principense. This book by Philip Maurer (M), which provides new, extensive documentation on Principense, is thus a most welcome publication, all the more so when one considers that the number of surviving native speakers of this endangered language certainly does not exceed 40, most of whom are already in their sixties.

Together with eight other languages (Quint forthcoming a; Norton and Kuku Alaki 2015), Dagik belongs to the Talodian group, which itself is one of the five subdivisions of the Kordofanian family of the Niger-Congo phylum. To my knowledge, John Vanderelst’s monograph is the first book-length study entirely devoted to the description of one of the Talodian languages.

Comme son titre l’indique, l’ouvrage recensé représente une description
d’ensemble d’un parler occitan de type languedocien septentrional, produite par Jean Sibille (désormais JS), chercheur titulaire au C.N.R.S., travaillant
essentiellement sur la langue occitane.

La présente grammaire consiste fondamentalement en une description morphosyntaxique de l’émérillon teko, une langue tupi pratiquée par environ 400 personnes vivant en majorité dans plusieurs villages de la moitié sud de la Guyane française (p. 3 et 7). Cet ouvrage est « une version remaniée de [la] thèse de doctorat (…) soutenue en 2003 » par Françoise Rose (désormais R), aujourd’hui chargée de recherche au CNRS.

Today, the Kordofanian family of the Niger-Congo phylum remains one of the most poorly researched language families in Africa and worldwide. This book makes two descriptive grammars available to the scientific community, respectively Tira and Otoro (both of which belonging to the Heibanian branch of Kordofanian) and is therefore a most welcome publication.
The author of those grammars, Roland C. Stevenson (1915‒1991), is a member of the Church Missionary Society, who first arrived in Sudan in 1937 and soon got involved in the study of various Sudanese tongues. He devoted his PhD (Stevenson 1956-57) to the languages spoken in the Nuba Mountains, a region which is the home area of all attested Kordofanian languages. As “descriptive and comparative work on Kordofanian languages is still in its infancy”  (Schadeberg 1989: 79), Stevenson’s abundant linguistic production remains one of the main sources (and in some cases the only one) available for many Kordofanian languages.
The editor of these grammars, Thilo Schadeberg, is one of the very few linguists to have regularly worked and published on Kordofanian languages (e.g. Schadeberg 1981a/b, 1989) since the second half of the XXth century. As explained in the preface of the book, Stevenson wrote his Tira (TI) and Otoro (OT) grammars in 1942 and 1943 respectively. However, these existed only as typescripts and it is thanks to Schadeberg’s efforts that “the data and analyses” they contain are “presented here [i.e. in this book] for the first time in print” (p. viii).

Principense is one of the four Gulf of Guinea Portuguese-based Creoles (GGPCs) - the other three being Sãotomense, Angolar, and Annobonese - a language family for which the lack of accurate, detailed descriptions is particularly striking. Prior to the publication of this book, Günther’s (1973) study – a serious but comparatively short work – was the main source of linguistic information on Principense. This book by Philip Maurer (M), which provides new, extensive documentation on Principense, is thus a most welcome publication, all the more so when one considers that the number of surviving native speakers of this endangered language certainly does not exceed 40, most of whom are already in their sixties.

As stated in the Preface (IX-XII), this volume is a selection of fifteen papers presented at three meetings (2004, 2005, and 2006) held by the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics and which have been regrouped by the editors into three parts, devoted to phonology, synchronically oriented analyses, and diachronic studies, respectively.