Author’s Introduction African languages have played an important role in the development of linguistic theory but their role in the fields of historical linguistics and linguistic typology has been less prominent. Africa’s linguistic diversity has been long underestimated given the dominance of the four‐family model proposed by Joseph Greenberg. Criticism of this model has long held among specialists in some of Africa’s smaller and lesser‐known language families, but has only recently become more widely acknowledged among linguists. Archaeologists, geneticists, and others continue to model African prehistory based on African linguistic classifications, which are outdated and which have failed to withstand scrutiny. This teaching and learning guide suggests a program to train scholars in recognizing and evaluating the standards by which various African language classifications have been made. Africa’s linguistic diversity will be shown to be far greater than what is suggested by the four‐family model. Author Recommends 1. Childs, G. Tucker. 2003. The classification of African languages. An Introduction to African Languages, 19–53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. A highly readable introduction to the subject, ‘The classification of African languages’ provides an overview of the four‐phylum model, along with the discussion of some of the major critiques that have been made of it. 2. Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. and F.K. Erhard Voeltz. 2007. Africa. Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages, 579–634. ed. by Christopher Moseley. London: Routledge. ‘Africa’ provides an overview of the major changes to the picture of African language classification that have been accepted by leading historical linguists and specialists. This reading also includes a list of endangered African languages, and an up‐to‐date discussion of Africa’s linguistic areas. 3. Campbell, Lyle and William J. Poser. 2008. Africa. Language Classification: History and Method, 203–245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The ‘Africa’ section of Campbell and Poser’s book surveys the history of African language classification. Examples are given showing problems with the types of evidence used to uphold Greenberg and pre‐Greenberg classifications. 4. Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. 2008. Language ecology and linguistic diversity on the African continent. Language and Linguistics Compass 2(5).840–858. DOI: DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00085.x The article ‘Language ecology and linguistic diversity on the African continent’ discusses recent revisions to African linguistic classification and pays special attention to the development of spread zones and accretion zones on the continent. It also details several cases of contact‐induced linguistic changes. 5. Batibo, Herman M. 2005. The endangered languages of Africa. Language Decline and Death in Africa: Causes, Consequences and Challenges, 62–86. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. The book ‘Language Decline and Death in Africa’ is an important survey of the factors that have been leading to a loss of linguistic diversity on the African continent. Chapter 5 ‘The endangered languages of Africa’ provides a concise summary of these factors, as well as a country‐by‐country outline of endangered languages. 6. Mous, Maarten. 2003. Loss of linguistic diversity in Africa. Language Death and Language Maintenance: Theoretical, Practical and Descriptive Approaches, 157–170. ed. by Mark Janse and Sijmen Tol. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. The article ‘Loss of linguistic diversity in Africa’ surveys the linguistic genetic diversity of the continent’s languages and provides an overview of the factors that have led to a language shift in Africa. Online Materials 1. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS) http://wals.info/index The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS) is a database of over 58,000 datapoints of phonological, grammatical, and lexical features of a subset of the world’s languages. The database allows scholars see maps of the distribution of these features, and to read the 142 chapters examining these structural features across the typological database. The Online database is a project of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Max Planck Digital Library, edited by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie (Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, 2008). WALS was also published as a book (with CD‐ROM) by Oxford University Press in 2005. 2. SIL Electronic Survey Reports http://www.sil.org/silesr/indexes/languages.asp The SIL Electronic Survey Reports website provides links to a large number of language surveys (in a downloadable pdf format) produced by Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) researchers. These reports include a great deal of linguistic information about a large number of African languages. Of particular interest to the comparative linguist is the large number of word lists included in the reports. 3. Jouni Maho’s Web Resources for African Languages http://www.africanlanguages.org/ Jouni Maho’s ‘Web Resources for African Languages’ pages provide a continuously updated list of online databases and downloadable documents on African languages. Links to both published and unpublished sources are included. The pages also provide a select print bibliography for each language family or isolate. 4. Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary (CBOLD) http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/CBOLD/ The Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary (CBOLD) at the University of California Berkeley as started in 1994 by Larry Hyman and John Lowe but includes contributions from scholars from many other institutions. It includes over 20 searchable Bantu language dictionaries, the Tervuren database of Bantu Lexical Reconstructions (BLR2) (with 9800 entries), and the Tanzanian Language Survey lexical database. 5. Ethnologue: Languages of the World http://www.ethnologue.com/ Ethnologue is an ‘encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,912 known living languages’ produced by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). This website provides a quick and handy means of getting information about such topics as: the languages spoken in each