Basically a defense of Joseph Greenberg's classification of African Languages (1963), this article also discusses in non-technical terms and in reference to the African situation how linguists deal with language change and how language relationships are determined. (FB)

The materials included in this document concern the theory, objectives, and administrative issues behind the project to describe the languages of the world. The basic objective of the project is to collect a series of language descriptions which achieve an acceptable level of descriptive adequacy without interfering with the freedom of the…