Clement Martyn Doke

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Clement Martyn Doke (1893-1980) was a South African linguist working mainly on African languages. A most prolific writer, he published a string of grammars, several dictionaries, comparative work, and a history of Bantu linguistics. Many of these works appeared while he was working in relative obscurity at the University of the Witwatersrand (1923-1953). He wrote on Zulu and other Bantu languages, and was an early describer of Khoisan and Bantu click consonants, devising phonetic symbols for a number of them. Realizing that the grammatical structures of Bantu languages are quite different from those of European languages, he was one of the first African linguists of his time to abandon the Euro-centric approach to language description for a more locally grounded one.

Doke's report "'Report on the unification of the Shona dialects" (1931) was an attempt to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona. Doke devised a unified orthography based on the Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika dialects. However, Doke's orthography was never fully accepted and the South African government introduced an alternative, leaving Shona with two competing orthographies between 1935-1955.

In the early 1940s, Doke collaborated with Zulu poet and scholar Benedict Wallet Vilakazi to create a Zulu-English dictionary, published 1948.

[edit] Selected publications

Bantu linguistic terminology. London; New York Longmans, Green, 1935.
Outline grammar of Bantu. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, 1943.
Zulu-English Dictionary. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1948. (with Benedict Wallet Vilakazi)
The Southern Bantu languages. London; New York: Oxford University Press, 1954.
Contributions to the history of Bantu linguistics. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1961. (with D. T. Cole)