Preface -- List of Tables, Maps and Figures -- List of Languages -- List of figures with cited and archived web pages -- Copyrights for reproduced photographs -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1 What this book is about -- 2 Structure of the book -- 1 Multilingualism on the ground -- 1.1 Societal multilingualism in Senegal -- 1.2 Individual repertoires: six case studies -- 1.2.1 Localist identities for moving targets -- 1.2.2 Purposeful alienation: the ethnolinguistic chameleon -- 1.2.3 The rhetorical return to lost roots -- 1.2.4 A return to what roots? -- 1.2.5 I am what I speak? -- 1.2.6 Well, I'm not what I speak -- 1.3 Societal practices nurturing multilingualism -- 1.3.1 Exogynous marriage patterns and movement of daughters -- 1.3.2 Language acquisition in peer groups and age classes -- 1.3.3 Fostering -- 1.3.4 Professional, ritual and crisis mobility and migration -- 1.3.5 Joking relationships -- 1.4 Written languages and the interaction of written and spoken repertoires -- 1.4.1 The ecology of writing in Senegal -- 1.4.2 The making of guilty illiterates -- 1.4.3 African writing: what scope, which languages and scripts? -- 1.4.3.1 Grapho- and eurocentric ideologies and "restricted literacies" -- 1.4.3.2 Some literacies are more visible than others -- 1.4.3.3 Ajami literacies -- 1.4.3.4 The Ge'ez script -- 1.4.3.5 The Bamun syllabary -- 1.4.3.6 N'ko -- 1.4.3.7 The Tifinagh script -- 1.4.3.8 The Vai syllabary -- 1.5 For an integrated view of spoken and written multilingual and multiscriptal practices -- 2 Doing things with words -- 2.1 Some symbolic dimensions of language -- 2.2 A complete language -- 2.3 Speech registers -- 2.3.1 Play languages -- 2.3.2 Youth languages -- 2.3.3 Respect languages and other examples of paralexification -- 2.3.4 Special purpose languages -- 2.3.5 Avoidance languages.

2.3.6 Ritual languages -- 2.3.7 Spirit languages -- 2.4 What we can learn from users of speech registers -- 3 Language and ideology -- 3.1 Language and power -- 3.1.1 Missionary activities and literacy development efforts -- 3.1.2 Power relationships -- 3.1.3 Conflicting language ideologies -- 3.2 Reducing diversity and creating standards -- 3.3 Constructing linguistic deficits and reacting to language obsolescence -- 3.3.1 Lack of words, abundance of sounds -- 3.3.2 The visible and the invisible -- 3.4 Remaining who we are: local theories and concepts of translation -- 3.4.1 Socio-historical background -- 3.4.2 Foreign text in women's tales -- 3.4.3 Translating silence -- 3.5 Ways of making history -- 3.5.1 Eastern origins -- 3.5.2 Hone interpretations of Kisra traditions -- 3.5.3 Spirits of the past -- 3.5.4 Where people think (and don't think) they come from -- 3.6 Ideologies, semiotics and multilingualism -- 4 Language and knowledge -- 4.1 Creation of knowledge -- 4.1.1 The invention of tradition -- 4.1.2 The view from within -- 4.1.3 Essentialization vs. inclusion -- 4.2 Invention of evolution: colonial encounters -- 4.2.1 Why collect, count and classify African languages? -- 4.2.2 Linguistics as science, and language as evolution -- 4.2.3 The origin of data -- 4.2.4 Borders based on typology: noun class ideologies -- 4.3 Epistemes and the expression of knowledge -- 4.3.1 Terminologies -- 4.3.2 Categories and the power of tradition -- 4.3.3 Emic and etic perspectives: Baïnounk noun classes -- 4.4 The language of knowledge -- 4.4.1 Evidentials and perception -- 4.4.2 When knowledge systems converge: Atlantic noun classes again -- 4.5 Endangered knowledge -- 5 Language dynamics -- 5.1 A glance at linguistic diversity -- 5.2 Africa in the context of global endangerment discourses.

5.2.1 African languages as the marginalized among the marginalized -- 5.2.2 Inapplicable global endangerment criteria -- 5.2.3 Ignoring multilingualism and real language dynamics -- 5.3 Linguistic rhetoric surrounding endangered languages -- 5.3.1 The misleading equation of rare with small or endangered -- 5.3.2 Sociohistorical versus biologistic reasoning surrounding endangered languages -- 5.4 Where and why African languages are vital or "dying" -- 5.4.1 Language death in the literal sense -- 5.4.2 Languages and climate change -- 5.4.3 Languages and civil unrest -- 5.4.4 Urbanization -- 5.5 Africa-specific vitality and endangerment criteria -- 5.5.1 The existence of communities of practice and social networks for language socialization in a given language ecology -- 5.5.2 A "home base" providing the opportunities for maintaining and creating communities of practice and social networks in a given language ecology -- 5.5.3 Socioeconomic and political stability in the language ecology in question -- 5.5.4 Attitudes by speakers and non-speakers to the language ecology -- 5.5.5 The reification of languages in the ecology as "named languages" and their authentication as fully-fledged languages -- 5.6 Responses to language endangerment and marginalization in Africa -- 5.6.1 Overcoming colonial language policies? -- 5.6.2 Continuing imbalanced power relationships -- 5.6.3 The mimesis of mimesis: mimetic excess -- 5.6.4 Outsiders as the "owners" of African languages -- 5.6.5 Linguists as failing to inform discourses of endangerment -- 5.7 Language as a thing versus language as flexible social practice -- 5.8 Consequences for the relationships of documentation with "maintenance" and "revitalization" -- 5.9 Revitalization in the future.

6 Not languages: repertoires as lived and living experience -- 6.1 Lessons from Africa -- 6.2 Changing our metaphors -- 6.3 The promise of a different approach -- 6.4 On the way, obstacles -- 6.4.1 Hegemonic northern discourses -- 6.4.2 The canon of descriptive linguistics: power relations in a small field -- 6.4.3 Researchers and communities as generic pawns on a competitive playing field -- 6.5 Finally, a vision -- 6.5.1 First of all: more time and freedom -- 6.5.2 Then: the notion of quality -- 6.5.3 The result: open-ended collaborative projects -- 6.6 Paradigms as they shift and shuffle -- 6.6.1 African languages as agency - awake or sleeping -- 6.6.2 The tangible realm of language -- References -- Language Index -- Subject Index -- Author Index.