This site provide you with information relevant to bantu languages and linguistics on the net. A survey report for the bantu languages by derek nurse cartographer. The bantu language with the largest total number of speakers is swahili. The title of this short working paper is called the bantu rosetta stones and its main purpose is to draw attention and awareness in the field of afrolinguistic egyptology. Most bantu languages have tones which serve to make lexical andor grammatical distinctions. Although these sounds are less frequent in bantu languages, they do occur in northwest bantu as well as in east bantu, both on the northeastern coast and in the southeast maddieson 2003. Fundamental all languages languages by family nigercongo atlanticcongo voltacongo benuecongo bantoidcross bantoid southern bantoid bantu articles on this topic in other wikimedia projects can be found at. The 2016 revision key findings and advance tables pdf.
An estimated 2,5003,000 years ago bc to 500 bc, although other sources put the start of the bantu expansion closer to 3000 bc, speakers of the protobantu language began a series of migrations eastward and. Congobrazzaville national languages online dictionary, bantu web site. It is probably the origin of rap and has its own origin in the. Bantu languages, which impose a maximal size condition and stringent consonant distribution constraints on stems. Problems of citation forms in dictionaries of bantu languages john g.
Scholars of bantu languages have long posited a common protobantu pb source from which modernday bantu languages have evolved. Linguistic evidence regarding bantu origins the journal. Grammatical and lexical comparison of the greater ruvu. The bantu languages descend from a common protobantu language, which is believed to have been spoken in what is now cameroon in central africa. The bantu languages are a group of some 500 languages, primarily spoken in africa, that belong to the benuecongo branch of the nigercongo language. The somali bantu iii preface this booklet is a basic introduction to the people, history, and cultures of the somali bantu. The acquisition of bantu languages katherine demuth brown. New developments in the classification of bantu languages.
Bantu expansion shows that habitat alters the route and pace. The linear ordering of tamneg markers in the bantu. The timne and cognate languages of sierra leone and the north guinea coast use pronominal prefixes and a system of concord, the employment of the latter being precisely similar to the same practice in the bantu languages. There is a high resemblance between all of the eastern bantu languages, which can be explained by a common ancestor and relatively recent splitting up, or to a period of physical contact, or, presumably to both nurse and philippson 1975.
A comparative grammar of the south african bantu languages. They are nearly synonymous with guthries bantu zone s, apart from the exclusion of shona and the inclusion of makhuwa. Kodi archive and support file vintage software community software apk msdos cdrom software cdrom software library console living room software sites tucows software library shareware cdroms software capsules compilation cdrom images zx spectrum doom level cd. Media in category bantu languages the following 24 files are in this category, out of 24 total. Setswana is a bantu language in the south eastern zone zone s in doke. Zones k and r are also included in this group on most trees. Fsm2 and the morphological analysis of bantu nouns first. Directional asymmetries in the morphology and phonology of. Bantu articles on this topic in other wikimedia projects can be found at. Although bantu languages are classified as largely agglutinative and exhibit significant inherent structural similarity, they differ substantially in terms of their phonological features implying that each bantu language requires an independent morphological analyzer. The principal writers are daniel van lehman and omar eno. Apparently in the parent language this particle had already these alternative forms, which resemble those in some west african negro languages. Tanzanian newspapers newspapers in bantu languages on the web. Bantu words in american english terms you should know for week 11 part 02 are.
Bantu languages root, prefix, prefixes, vowel and language. Bantu languages simple english wikipedia, the free. Welcome to all bantu netizens speakers, students, researchers. Thus, a comparison of the acquisition of bantu languages offers an extremely rich area for research, providing insights not only into how language is learned, but also into the possible impact that language learning may exert on processes of historical change. Guthries divisions of the bantu languages were based on geography, not on language characteristics. Proto bantu is the reconstructed common ancestor of the bantu languages, a subgroup of the benuecongo family. The bantu migrations agriculture, ironworking technology spread throughout africa because of migration number of groups in africa spoke related languages originated from language called protobantu developed in what is now cameroon, nigeria over time more than 2,000 bantu languages developed. Intensive chichewa pdf files a 1969 grammar published by likuni press of malawi distributed for noncommercial use only. Although these sounds are less frequent in bantu languages, they do occur in northwest bantu as well as in east bantu, both on the northeastern coast and. From a comparative perspective, it is in fact the medial. Middle passage bantu languages slang black english africanamerican vernacular english play the dozens. Bantu education act, 1953 1 bantu education act, 1953 bantu education act, 1953 act to provide for the transfer of the administration and control of native education from the several provincial administrations to the government of the union, and for matters incidental thereto. Kiango university of dar es salaam, tanzania abstract the headword of a dictionary entry serves different functions.
The bantu languages are a large family of languages spoken primarily in the southern part of africa. They include all of the major bantu languages of south africa, botswana, lesotho, swaziland, and mozambique, with outliers such as lozi in zambia. Meeussen 1967 was particularly instrumental in reconstructing what is thought to be the noun class system of protobantu see also guthrie 196771 and welmers 1973. Grammatical and lexical comparison of the greater ruvu bantu. Southern bantu languages simple english wikipedia, the. Consider, for example, bantu languages in southern. The southern bantu languages, however, are also a valid linguistic group the southern bantu languages are a. A brief summary of the bantu acquisition literature by language is provided below. It offers a bench mark for future study and research in soundmeaning relationships between words of common origin shared in the ancient egyptian and bantu languages of africa. Use of plant names for the classification of the bantu languages of. In this research we note that bantu languages have common logical forms and. First, it is a form which the user will first look up in the dictionary before reading other phonological, morphological, syntactic. Revising the bantu tree american museum of natural history. In the case of most bantu languages these resources are not available now, and are unlikely to become available in the near future.
It is designed primarily for service providers and others assisting somali bantu refugees in their new communities in the united states. The pectinate nature of the tree means that the bantu language groups that descended from the bantu common ancestor node 1, fig. Introduction verb stems in bantu languages may include a number of derivational suffixes called extensions that express various functions, such as causative, applicative, reciprocal or passive. It is thought to have originally been spoken in westcentral africa in the area of what is now cameroon. A comparative grammar of the south african bantu languages comprising those of zanzibar, mozambique, the zambesi, kafirland, benguela, angola, the congo, the ogowe, the cameroons, the lake region, etc by torrend, j. Bantu languages, a group of some 500 languages belonging to the bantoid subgroup of the benuecongo branch of the nigercongo language family. The work reported on in this article forms part of a larger project aimed at the technological development of setswana. New developments in the classification of bantu languages and. On the basis of common phonological or morphological innovations and relying on the intuition of other linguists, nurse and philippson propose to bundle the bantu languages in some 80 mostly uncontroversial local groupings. The bantu languages are a large family of languages spoken by the bantu peoples throughout. Sesotho sa leboa english online northern sotho english dictionary pukuntsu ya sesotho sa leboa seisimane. Linguistic evidence regarding bantu origins the journal of. As the source of bantu languages is generally argued to be in southwest adamawa, new data on bantu and related languages is important to the. Introduction studies of the noun in bantu languages have traditionally concentrated on the morphology of the noun with its elaborate class system and the underlying semantic strands.
Parts of the bantu area include languages from other language families see map. The bantu languages are spoken in a very large area, including most of africa from southern cameroon eastward to kenya and southward to the southernmost tip of the continent. The southern bantu languages are a large group of bantu languages, largely validated in janson 199192. After having formatted the data into a nexus format the one used in. By theend of thecourse you willbe able to think of a lot of other syntactic and morphological commonalities on your own. Bantu language is a crossword puzzle clue that we have spotted over 20 times. Over 500 languages are classified in this family, including swahili, xhosa, and zulu. All nouns are assigned to a noun class, where the number of noun classes varies between 12 and 20. Morphologythe most distinctive morphological feature of bantu languages is the grouping of nouns in different classes, marked by a prefix. Approximately 30004000 years ago, it split off from other southern bantoid languages when the bantu expansion began to the south and east. Meeussen 1967 was particularly instrumental in reconstructing what is thought to be the noun class system of proto bantu see also guthrie 196771 and welmers 1973. Bantu words in american english montclair state university. English to xhosa translation page a website that translated words and phrases to and from xhosa by martha r.
Medial markers are used by the large majority of bantu languages. Mwenyi k352 yukawa 1987b, use a high amount of initial markers, while languages of the northwest and central north, e. An estimated 2,5003,000 years ago bc to 500 bc, although other sources put the start of the bantu expansion closer to 3000 bc, speakers of the protobantu language began a series of migrations eastward and southward, carrying agriculture. A common characteristic of bantu languages is that they use words such as muntu or mutu. Pdf cultural phylogeography of the bantu languages of sub. Scholars of bantu languages have long posited a common proto bantu pb source from which modernday bantu languages have evolved. All members of a given class share the same prefix. Protobantu is the reconstructed common ancestor of the bantu languages, a subgroup of the benuecongo family.
The latter was the most frequent of all speech errors. The definition of the bantu cornes from a variety of sources, most. A note on bantu extensions and syntactic word formation. The somali bantu lutheran family services rocky mountains. This paper focuses on the treatment of nouns of runyakitara, a bantu language. Pdf there is disagreement about the routes taken by populations speaking bantu. Pagibete c401 reeder 1998, tend to favour final markers. The west bantu languages were paraphyletic, that is, they did not share a unique common ancestor. Each word must end in a vowel though in some modern dialects in eastern equatorial, west and south africa the terminal vowel may be elided in rapid pronunciation, or be dropped, or absorbed in the terminal. A comparative grammar of the south african bantu languages comprising those of zanzibar, mozambique, the zambesi, kafirland, benguela, angola, the congo, the ogowe, the cameroons, the lake region, etc. Here, we build phylogenetic trees of bantu languages and map them onto. Bantu languages are spoken largely east and south of the present day country of cameroon. Apr 27, 2020 the bantu languages are a large family of languages spoken primarily in the southern part of africa. The homogeneity of this family is so striking, as compared with the inexplicable confusion of tongues which reigns in africa north of the bantu borderland, that the close relationships of these dialects.
The bantu languages or narrow bantu languages are a branch of the nigercongo languages. Guthrie, 1971 and one of the eleven official languages of south africa. They then combine many of these to form 26 intermediate groupings of which about half are controversial. Although tanda is a common verb in zulu, it has not in zulu all these variations, and in some other language where it may by chance exhibit all the variations its own form is changed to londa or randa. Since the early seventies, several classifications of bantu languages have been proposed. Students of bantu languages have a great deal of material to work with, since the family is so large and speakers are widely scattered across africa. Idiosyncratic sound systems of the south african bantu languages. Bantu languages simple english wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. There are about 520 languages in the bantu family, 670 languages in the southern bantoid branch which includes bantu, and 1,532 in nigercongo.