In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden demonstrative Formative aus vier Sprachen (Figuig, Kabyle, Tachelhit und Ghadamsi) anhand von Grammatiken und Textkorpora analysiert und die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse in Bezug zu Theorien aus der universal ausgerichteten Sprachwissenschaft einerseits sowie zum Vergleich von Berbersprachen andererseits erörtert.

This paper examines the syntactic difference between double object NPs and indirect object NPs based on seven syntactic diagnostics. On the basis of semantic criteria the double object verbs are classified into two groups. The paper claims that the double object NPs behave both in markedly different manners from each other and from Hausa indirect object verbs.

Diese Lesematerialien sind für Deutsch-Muttersprachler konzipiert worden, die Amharisch lernen wollen. Die vorliegenden Geschichten wurden von Studenten aus verschiedenen Landesteilen Äthiopiens zusammengetragen und zeichnen sich besonders durch ihre literarische Gestaltung aus.

This paper aims to give a few indications of the various attempts to formulate a language policy in education in the Northern Region in Nigeria. It starts by giving a brief historical perspective on the colonial government’s language policies, the attitudes of three policy makers and the methods they used to implement their education policies. Furthermore it discusses the language policy of the post-colonial governments and some of the barriers to the ascendancy of Hausa in education.

The first article proposes a new name for the Southern Khoisan family, based on the fact that all sufficiently attested languages show some reflex of the noun *tuu 'people'. This is a more suitable alternative to previous terms, because it not only unambiguously identifies the genealogical unit and is in line with established conventions for classificatory nomenclature, but also avoids several drawbacks of other terms, among them the heretofore unproven idea of a genealogical unit Khoisan. The second article gives more substantial and systematic evidence that Tuu alias Southern Khoisan itself is in fact a coherent genealogical entity. It first outlines basic structural features of Tuu languages showing that they constitute a robust and typologically fairly distinct language type. It goes on to show that this is associated with a sufficient amount of sound-meaning correspondences, in both grammar and lexicon, in order to warrant an interpretation in terms of inheritance from a common ancestor language. Both studies are the result of work carried out in the project 'Genetic and typological profile of the Tuu language family (alias Southern Khoisan): cataloguing and linguistic analysis of existing sources'. My sincere thanks to the 'Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft' for having sponsored this project with a research grant.

The major aim of this work is to give an overview of present tense copula constructions in selected Semitic and Cushitic languages spoken in Ethiopia. In particular, we deal with languages spoken in the central parts of the country, namely Gurage languages of different genetic affiliations, Wellegga Oromo and K’abeena. In addition we discuss data from Ge’ez, Tigre, Tigrinya, Argobba, Amharic and Harari.

Der Aufsatz behandelt die Verschriftlichung des Swahili in zwei verschiedenen Schriften, der arabischen – in vorkolonialer Zeit – und der lateinischen unter Einfluss der Missionen und der Kolonialregierung. Er geht auf die Probleme ein, die bei der Schreibung in diesen beiden Systemen entstanden sind und zeigt Lösungen, wie sie im Laufe der langen Schreib- und Literaturtradition in beiden Alphabeten entwickelt worden sind.

Der Artikel geht auf einen Vortrag zurück, der im Rahmen einer Ringvorlesung des Fachbereiches Orientalistik der Universität Hamburg mit dem Titel « Die Afro-Asiatischen Sprachen » an der Universität Hamburg gehalten worden ist. Bei der Übertragung des Vortrages in das Medium eines Artikels wurde versucht, die Spuren des anders gearteten Genres so weit wie möglich zu tilgen. Völlig ist das nicht gelungen – vielleicht lies sich der Artikel aber so auch etwas besser.

This study examines the language attitudes of members of three (formerly) Afrikaans-speaking congregations of the multilingual Moravian Church in South Africa (MCSA) with regard to current language practices within the Church and their ideas for a future language policy. It is based on interviews held with members of these congregations, while concepts of identity serve as a theoretical framework. Through these, it is shown that the MCSA could neither pursue a monolingual nor a consistently multilingual language policy in order not to aggravate the identification of its members with the Church.

”Why genetics and linguistics need each other: genes and clicks from a linguistic perspective” Knight et al. (2003) have argued, largely from a genetic perspective, that clicks “may be more than 40.000 years old” (p.470) and thus “are an ancient element of human language” (p.471). This has nourished the hypothesis, expressed especially in popular science, that clicks were a feature of the ancestral mother tongue. The claim by Knight et al. (2003) is based on the observation that two populations in Africa speaking languages with click phonemes, namely Hadza in eastern Africa and Ju|’hoan in southern Africa, are maximally distinct in genetic terms: both Y chromosome and mtDNA data suggest that the two “are separated by genetic distance as great [as] or greater than that between any other pair of African populations” (p.464). It is also claimed that the only explanation for the presence of clicks in the two groups is inheritance from an early common ancestor language, hence the alleged, very great age of clicks in general. Other explanations for the clicks of Hadza and Ju|’hoan, in particular independent development and language contact, are explicitly excluded by the authors. This paper seeks to demonstrate on the basis of purely linguistic evidence that this view cannot be accepted: both independent innovation and contact-induced transmission of clicks are attested. The click system of Hadza in particular will be shown to have a profile which is quite compatible with an explanation in terms of language contact. The linguistic evidence thus does not imply that clicks go back to a language spoken at the dawn of human evolution; there is no good reason to exclude the possibility that the emergence of clicks in Africa represents a far later episode in the diversification of human speech. More reliable hypotheses about the early development of language can be reached only by truly interdisciplinary research in the disciplines concerned, here genetics and linguistics.