Research on language and culture in Africa

The chapter surveys research into the relations among language, culture, and cognition in Africa. A leitmotif is linguistic relativity; the hypothesis that our habitual linguistic practices influence the way we categorize and express the perceptual flow of daily experiences. The chapter is organized around how cultural meanings are encoded and are inferable from forms at all levels of language: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. These are manifested in various domains including categorization. the cultural bases of nominal classification; the sensorium, linguistic and cultural evidence for the importance of seeing (colors and patterns), and of balance. Manifestations of oblique communication and its impact on grammar, in particular, the link between triadic communication and the use of logophoric and interpretive markers are part of our prime examples of the language-culture symbiosis. Trends in research into the cultural and conceptual bases of social interaction in African communities in particular ideologies of greetings and partings and the related practices of naming and addressing are discussed. An urgent direction in this research is multilingual socialization. We highlight the empirical knowledge African languages have contributed as well as the challenges they pose to existing models and frameworks in the study of the language-culture interface.