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The pervasiveness of multilingualism throughout the African continent has led it to be viewed as Africa’s “lingua franca.” Nevertheless, sociolinguistic research on this topic has concentrated mostly on urbanized areas, even though the majority of Africans still live in rural regions, and rural multilingualism is clearly of much older provenance than its urban counterpart. In urban domains, individual language repertoires are dominated by the interplay between European ex-colonial languages, African lingua francas, and local languages, and language ideologies emphasize the ordering of languages in a hierarchy that is tied to social status. The situation in rural areas is clearly distinct, though it has yet to be thoroughly investigated. Early work on language use in rural Africa tended to background the presence of multilingualism and was dominated by an approach that viewed each community (or “tribe”) as having its own language. Thanks to the progressive adoption of ethnographic methods of inquiry, facilitated by language documentation research especially since the beginning of the 21st century, it has been possible to more effectively study areas of high linguistic diversity in West and Central Africa which demonstrate that multilingualism plays an integral role in structuring social relations. Available case studies document the presence of individuals with linguistic repertoires that are primarily oriented around local languages, ideologies, and practices and that do not clearly fit with what is known from urban environments. The most important theme that emerges from this work is the extent to which rural multilingualism is linked to the specific dynamics holding among communities that are near to each other rather than being a reflection of a more general, externally imposed value system. While this result makes it difficult to characterize rural multilingualism as a single, coherent phenomenon, it does point to the utility of a shared toolkit of research strategies for exploring it in more detail. In particular, ethnographic methods are required in order to ascertain the major local social divisions which language choice both reflects and constructs in these areas, and it is additionally important to focus on how individual repertoires are tied to specific life histories rather than to assume that groupings that are salient to the outside researcher (e.g., “villages” or “compounds”) are the relevant units of analysis. Finally, investigation of multilingualism in rural Africa is not only valuable for what it reveals about social dynamics on the continent, but it also seems likely to yield important insights for the study of sociolinguistics more broadly.

The last decade has seen increasing attention paid to questions of grammatical complexity, in particular regarding the extent to which some languages can be said to be more ‘complex’ than others, whether globally or with respect to particular subsystems. Creoles have featured prominently in these debates, with various authors arguing that they are particularly simple when set against non-creoles, with an apparent lack of overt morphology in creoles often cited as one of the ways in which their grammars are especially simplified. This paper makes two contributions to this discussion. First, it develops metrics of grammatical complexity that derive directly from a well-known model of creole development, thus providing an explicit link between the sociohistorical circumstances in which creoles formed and grammatical outcomes. Second, it applies these metrics to the newly published dataset from the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures, setting this data against that from the well-known World Atlas of Language Structures, allowing for a more comprehensive and rigorous quantitative comparison of complexity in contact and non-contact languages than has previously been possible. It will be seen that there is good evidence that contact languages are simplified overall with respect to a class of complexities labelled paradigmatic here but that this general conclusion nevertheless masks significant underlying variation among them.

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