The Acquisition of African Languages: Introduction to the Special Issue

Africa contains over one quarter of the languages currently used on the planet. The languages and the contexts in which they are used are diverse and therefore have much to teach us about language acquisition. However, African languages are chronically underrepresented in the language acquisition literature. This special issue of First Language contains 13 papers reporting new research findings on African languages, including studies investigating child-directed speech, phonological, prosodic, vocabulary, and morphosyntactic development, the development of narrative competence, and language assessment. In this introduction, we explain the motivation for the special issue, review past research on the acquisition of African languages, and introduce each of the 13 papers.