The history of Sonjo and Engaruka: a linguists' view

We have for several years worked together on the history of the Sonjo language and community. The results will appear as 'Sonjo: Description, classification, history' in volume 12/13 of Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika. During the writing of the article, we relied almost entirely on materials available to us outside the Sonjo area. It was only afterwards that we had the opportunity to actually undertake fieldwork in Sonjo by accompanying John Sottton in late 1992. it is intended for historian, not technical linguists. It focuses on those aspects of Sonjo which bear on Engaruka. Linguists can only deal with living people and their language, and Engaruka ruins have course neither. Sonjo is not just nearby, archeologically similar, and a link in a length and continuous chain of habitation, but is, from a linguistic viewpoint, the nearest relevant, identifiable and dateable entity.