ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief, non-exhaustive overview of the history of African language studies from the early nineteenth century. It will then narrow to focus on how scholars, particularly those from Germany, transformed the field from a humanistic pursuit to a discipline steeped in natural scientific methodologies. The transformation, which occurred around the turn of the twentieth century, shifted the discipline away from its roots in text-based, philological study, and towards an emphasis on the body’s physical production and articulation of sound. I will examine this change using the example of the Phonetics Laboratory that officials at the Hamburg Colonial Institute established in 1910 at the request of Carl Meinhof, then Europe’s foremost specialist in African languages. It was at the laboratory that Africans became Meinhof’s main subjects. Meinhof and his colleagues, including phonetician Giulio Panconcelli-Calzia, examined Africans using mechanical equipment designed to capture sound. The experiments that were conducted were never benign; instead they were expressions of colonial power, as the experiments were used to “prove” the primitivity of African languages in comparison with those belonging to Indo-European and other language families. Further, the African participants were subordinated to scientific research led by Europeans, and had little input into the tests performed on them.
