The Kuliak Languages of Eastern Uganda

For more than a century the question as to how the languages
of Africa can be classified has attracted the attention of linguists, and numerous hypotheses have been put forward. And yet, the linguistic map of Africa still looks chaotic and none of the many classifications which have been devised so far has found general acceptance among Africanists. This applies even to Joseph Greenberg’s genetic classification (1963) which, although being the most important piece of work so far produced on this subject, offers a number of new insights but no real solutions. One of the main reasons for Greenberg’s failure to achieve the hoped-for goal is that his method of language comparison is not adequate to cope
with the extraordinary diversity of linguistic forms found in Africa.
At the same time, the work of Greenberg has revealed that any attempts at large-scale comparisons for the purpose of discovering genetic relationships are as yet premature: they are beyond the scope of the techniques and methods presently available to historical linguists.