Vol. 98 (2025)

The current volume of Afrika und Übersee contains three sections. The first section is dedicated to contributions that were presented at the 10th Biennal International Colloquium on the Chadic Languages (BICCL) which took place in Hamburg from October 3–6, 2019 at the University of Hamburg. The six articles cover a wide range of topics. Gregory Anderson focuses on the complex evolution of STAMP morphs of West and Central Chadic languages.
The two contributions of James Roberts focus on the phonology of Chadic languages. The first article on palatalization and labialization in the Chadic languages of Chad was presented at the 4th BICCL that took place in October 2007 in Bayreuth. The second article focuses on the vowel system of Ndam. In both articles, Roberts shows that the prosodies labialization and palatalization produce a wide array of surface vowel qualities which often can be reduced to a few basic vowel phonemes in non-Central Chadic languages.
Ronald Schaefer and Francis Egbokhare compare the coding of phasal aspect in selected West Chadic and West Benue Congo languages. While Chadic languages such as Hausa and Miya express phasal aspect by verbs and a complement, West Benue Congo languages such as Emai rather use verbs with truncated complements and grammatical morphemes.
Henry Tourneux and Antonio Michielan explore lexical relations between the Central Chadic language Giziga and the Atlantic language Fulfulde. They identify a substantial layer of Arabic, Kanuri, Hausa and English loanwords that entered Giziga via Fulfulde.
Melanie Viljoen provides a detailed description of relative clauses in the Central Chadic language Gavar.
The Articles section contains three contributions. Pius Akumbu, Alexander Andrason and Levi E. Mokake explore conative animal calls in the two Bantu languages Oroko and Mokpe.
Anbessa Teferra focuses on number marking on nouns and adjectives in the Cushitic language Sidaama while Maarten Mous and Christian Rapold unmask the alleged East Cushitic language Proto Baz as a phantom by showing that the layer of Cushitic-sourced loans in Southern Nilotic previously identified as Proto-Baz cannot be attributed to a single source.
The volume closes with an obituary for the late Norbert Cyffer commemorated by Ludwig Gerhardt. A leading expert of the Kanuri language since his PhD in Hamburg, Norbert Cyffer held chairs for African Philology in Mainz and African Linguistics in Vienna.