Towards a grammar of address in multilingual African settings?

Greeting conventions and address forms have been treated from various perspectives in the literature. Rarely incorporated at length and with discourse examples in (reference) grammars of African lan­guages in the past, they form a culture- and language-specific system in its own right. While anthropologists have treated greetings and address behaviour in the context of access rituals, some more recent sociolinguistic investigations on African languages have started to look in more detail on discourse openings – including address forms – and other communicative events from an empirical perspective. With examples from different African languages I would like to discuss the question whether this may lead to a ‘grammar of address’ based on actual language use in multilingual settings.