© 2008 The Author Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Language and Linguistics Compass 2/5 (2008): 840–858, 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00085.x Language Ecology and Linguistic Diversity on the African Continent Gerrit J. Dimmendaal* Universität zu Köln Abstract Africanists have been criticized by comparative linguists working on language families in other parts of the world for being lumpers. The present contribution reviews current views among specialists on genetic diversity on the African continent. In addition, some of the causal mechanisms behind this language diversity are investigated. More specifically, the role played by innovations in subsistence economies and climatological changes is discussed. Special emphasis, however, is put on attitudes towards the role of language as a marker of social identity and their effect on language diversity. 1. The Genetic Classification of African Languages: A Brief State of the Art How well-established are the genetic units or phyla proposed some 45 years ago by Joseph Greenberg in his seminal contribution on the genetic classification of African languages (Greenberg 1963)? Among the four phyla originally proposed by him, the one most securely established today is Afroasiatic. Here, Greenberg followed up on pioneering work by nineteenth-century scholars, such as Müller (1867–1888) on what was then called Hamito-Semitic, and twentieth-century scholars like Delafosse (1914), who seems to have coined the term ‘afroasiatique’. In his initial series of studies on the genetic classification of African languages, published between 1949 and 1954 and reprinted as a monograph in 1955, Joseph Greenberg accepted this family as a valid genetic grouping. But he also added a branch, Chadic, which included languages spreading out in various directions from Lake Chad. As pointed out in Greenberg (1955), the term ‘Hamito-Semitic’ for this family should be avoided, for Semitic constituted but one of the five branches; moreover, the concept ‘Hamitic’ had developed racist connotations during preceding decades, in particular after Meinhof’s (1912) publication of Die Sprachen der Hamiten, which constituted a mixture of genetic and typological as well as (physical) anthropological criteria; Hamitic languages, according to Meinhof, originally were spoken by stock-keeping peoples of Cau- casian stock.