CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the study
Language is by all means the most enduring and about the most dynamic artifact of human history. Language is an enduring artifact because apart from being human specific, it is an integral part of human culture, and therefore, as old as human existence. Language is said to be dynamic in the sense that it changes as the society in which man lives and speaks language changes. It is this dynamism which reflects the nature and character of language that has given scholars/researchers sufficient cause to search and attain self knowledge about the nature and manner of change that takes place in language.
According to Agbedo (2009:7), historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) accounts for the development and changes that take place in languages. Essentially, historical linguistics focuses on five basic areas which are; describing and accounting for observed changes in languages, reconstructing the prehistory of languages and determining their relatedness, developing general theories about how and why language changes, describing the speech communities and studying the history of words. Since the quest for knowledge through scholarly research heightened, human knowledge has continued to grow deeper, thus leading to further breakdown of disciplines into more focused areas of study. This development gave rise to the emergence of comparative linguistics (originally called comparative philology) regarded as a branch of historical linguistics. It is principally concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their historical relatedness.
Agbedo (2007:7) posits that languages may be related by convergence through borrowing or genetic descent. Genetic descent implies a common origin or proto-language, and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in documented languages.
From the early development of historical and comparative linguistics, this subfield of linguistics mainly focused on the classification of the Indo-European languages, many of which have had written histories. However, the situation is not the same with the Niger–Congo language family where the comparative method has been sparingly used, leaving the bulk of languages under it unclassified; even where it is applied, lack of sustained efforts has failed to tie the language family together, therefore, such result often failed to receive wide acceptability. Olson (2004) decried this situation thus:
While the comparative method has occasionally been applied to small language families within Niger-Congo, particularly Bantu, its use has so far been neglected in tying the language family together as a whole. A comprehensive reconstruction of Niger-Congo, including the establishment of sound laws, remains the major future task in Niger-Congo classification
Therefore, there is need for a paradigm shift to studying the highly endangered languages of the sub-Saharan Africa, especially the Tivoid sub-language group of Bantu extraction. The Tivoid languages phylum is not well studied. Therefore, majority of languages in this group cannot be used for wider communication , especially as they have no written orthorgraphy and are not even known beyond there enclave. This has the propensity of affecting the enthnolinguistic vitality perception of their speakers thereby making them susceptible to endangerment.
| Project details | Contents |
|---|---|
| Number of Pages | 42 pages |
| Chapter one | Introduction |
| Chapter two | Literature review |
| Chapter three | methodology |
| Chapter four | Data analysis |
| Chapter five | Summary,discussion & recommendations |
| Reference | Reference |
| Questionnaire | Questionnaire |
| Appendix | Appendix |
| Chapter summary | 1 to 5 chapters |
| Available document | PDF and MS-word format |
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