While it is well accepted that bantu languages spread from their homeland cameroonnigeria approximately 5000 years ago ya, there is no consensus about the timing and geographical routes underlying this expansion. Most bantu languages have typologically unremarkable consonant inventories, typically. One is a kind of v2 effect found in relative clauses, but not in main clauses, which in. X, some common parent of all the bantu languages which. Introduction the present work builds on the work of carstens 2001 as well as henderson to appear in examining the syntax of compound tense ct structures in bantu. Bantu studies are now well over 150 years old and include some 10,000 publications. The syntax of agreement in bantu relatives brent henderson 1 the typology of bantu relatives many linguists have found bantu relative clauses interesting for two reasons. Panbantu verbstem reduplication as is well known, bantu languages have a highly agglutinative word structure. There is no mistaking a bantu language, which perhaps is what renders the study of this group so interesting and encouraging. Congobrazzaville national languages online dictionary, bantu web site.
Bantu language is a crossword puzzle clue that we have spotted over 20 times. Bantu language article about bantu language by the free. Subsequent studies of other languages nguni languages zulu and xhosa, sotho languages sesotho henceforth sotho and tswana, malawian chewa and the gabonese language sangu, have examined various aspects of childrens language acquisition. Some languages have limited syllabic nasals and coda syllable. A note on bantu extensions and syntactic word formation jochen zeller, university of kwazulunatal, durban. Many other bantu languages have a reduced fivevowel system i e a o u. Media in category bantu languages the following 24 files are in this category, out of 24 total. Pdf cultural phylogeography of the bantu languages of sub. Bantu languages are spoken largely east and south of the present day country of cameroon. Grammatical functions of the nasal prefix in bafut. One such phenomenon is vowel harmony, where suffixes typically alternate in height depending on the preceding vowel. Middle passage bantu languages slang black english africanamerican vernacular english play the dozens. Apparently in the parent language this particle had already these alternative forms, which resemble those in some west african negro languages. Like many languages, bantu languages express some tense and aspect relations via a.
All nouns are assigned to a noun class, where the number of noun classes varies between 12 and 20. Bantu languages, a group of some 500 languages belonging to the bantoid subgroup of the benuecongo branch of the nigercongo language family. There are around 500 bantu languages and the reconstruction of protobantu phonology, grammar and lexicon has met with. Introduction studies of the noun in bantu languages have traditionally concentrated on the morphology of the noun with its elaborate class. The southern bantu languages, also known as bantu zone s, are a group of languages in the bantu language family. Still others follow traditional animist religions, believing spirits are found in. The question to be answered is why languages display less verbal agreement in vs structures than in sv structures. This chapter provides an overview of the common syntactic features as well as the. The work reported on in this article forms part of a larger project aimed. Kiango university of dar es salaam, tanzania abstract the headword of a dictionary entry serves different functions. Pdf lexical reconstruction has been an important enterprise in bantu historical. East bantu comprises languages of zones e, f, j, n, p and s. While it is well accepted that bantu languages spread from their homeland cameroonnigeria. Sesotho sa leboa english online northern sotho english dictionary pukuntsu ya sesotho sa leboa seisimane.
I other i i central east s 1s like polyesia md unlike elsewhere in the world, few scholxs have questiond the correlation berneen the expansion of the languages and some sort of population migration. The bantu languages or narrow bantu languages are a branch of the nigercongo languages. Parameterizing agreement features in arabic, bantu. 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. In atlantic languages branch are the prevalence of noun class systems and the occurrence of full concord systems with many of the features described for the bantu languages.
Black association for nationalism through unity, a youth activism group in the 1960s. These languages are spoken in the equatorial forest, modern zambia and southwest africa. Bantu, syntax, bantu languages, morphology, information structure, word order. 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. The bantu languages often function as a reference point in typological. 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. Pdf there is disagreement about the routes taken by populations speaking bantu languages as they. Lexical semantics and selection of tam in bantu languages. 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. While there are typological characteristics common to these and other bantu languages, there are. 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.
A note on bantu extensions and syntactic word formation. 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. Bantu words in american english montclair state university. Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, or visit the webmasters page for free fun content. The expansion of bantu languages represents one of the most momentous events in the history of africa. The somali bantu lutheran family services rocky mountains. 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. Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of africa speaking a bantu language. The identity, or even the existence, of abokgind populations in the zairean rabforest remslins uncestain, but the. They are spoken by nearly onethird of the population of the continent, approximately 330 million people.
Miriti, school of computing and informatics, university of nairobi, p. 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 systematic study of bantu language acquisition began with lwandle kunenes 1979 dissertation on the acquisition of swati. The acquisition of bantu languages katherine demuth brown.
Pdf bringing together linguistic and genetic evidence to. Furthermore, the morphological marking of this alternation is close to, or even merged with, the tam. The southern bantu languages, however, are also a valid linguistic group the southern bantu languages are a group of languages in. 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. It is the system that one would, on internai evidence, reconstruct for proto bantu. Scholars of bantu languages have long posited a common protobantu pb source from which modernday bantu languages have evolved. Setswana is a bantu language in the south eastern zone zone s in doke. Greenberg, one of the most original and influential linguists of the twentieth century, died at his home in stanford, california, on may 7th, 2001, three weeks before his eightysixth birthday. First, it is a form which the user will first look up in the dictionary before.
It is estimated that there are more than 500 bantu languages spoken in subsaharan africa, making this one of the largest and most widespread language groupings in the world. 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. Guthrie, 1971 and one of the eleven official languages of south 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 have perhaps been a little exaggerated by earlier writers. New developments in the classification of bantu languages. They include all of the major bantu languages of south africa, botswana, lesotho, swaziland, and mozambique, with outliers such as lozi in zambia and namibia, and ngoni in. English to xhosa translation page a website that translated words and phrases to and from xhosa by martha r. 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. In the vast majority of the bantu dialects at the present day. 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.
In order to appreciate the issues which arise in verbstem reduplication, the traditional internal constituents of the verb in protobantu pb and most of the daughter languages are shown in 1, as reconstructed by meeussen 1967. Combinations of nasal plus consonant are also frequently subject to various modifications. Bantu languages, constitute the largest subbranch of the nigercongo languages. Guthries divisions of the bantu languages were based on geography, not on language characteristics. Spirantization and the 7to5 vowel merger in bantu thilo c. West bantu includes zones h, j, k, l, r, parts of d and usually m. Others, living in parts of africa influenced by missionary efforts are christian. Bantu languages have a number of features that are of interest to l2 researchers. Second language acquisition of bantu languages jstor. Uc berkeley phonology lab annual report 2008 submitted. Problems of citation forms in dictionaries of bantu languages john g. Each word must end in a vowel though in some mod ern dialects in eastern equatorial, west and south africa the ter minal vowel may be elided in rapid pronunciation, or be dropped, or absorbed in the terminal. This chapter surveys the main phonological phenomena found in bantu languages. Southern bantu languages simple english wikipedia, the.
Cultural phylogeography of the bantu languages of sub. The principal writers are daniel van lehman and omar eno. Greenberg was a major pioneer in the development of linguistics as an empirical science. They are nearly synonymous with guthries bantu zone s, apart from the exclusion of shona and the inclusion of makhuwa. The analysis of prefixlike elements such as tswana s31 from. Bantu languages simple english wikipedia, the free. It is probably the origin of rap and has its own origin in the. In many atlantic languages the initial consonant of the noun takes alternates according to the noun class prefix with which it occurs. There are about 520 languages in the bantu family, 670 languages in the southern bantoid branch which includes bantu, and 1,532 in nigercongo. Kiswahili have in common that some types of agreement targets e. Grammatical and lexical comparison of the greater ruvu. Genetics, archaeology and linguistics all point to the extensive distribution of this language family being the result of a population dispersal that began around 30005000 years ago 24. Here, we build phylogenetic trees of bantu languages and map them onto geographical space in order.
Bantu who settled in areas where there was a strong arab presence are muslim. Case of semantic classification of kiswahili verbs amani lusekelo1a abstract the existing literature on bantu verbal semantics demonstrated that inherent semantic content of verbs pairs directly with the selection ofreceived november 2015 tense, aspect and modality formatives in bantu languages like chasu, lucazi, lusamia, and shiyeyi. A comparative grammar of the south african bantu languages. View bantu linguistics research papers on academia. Bantu words in american english terms you should know for week 11 part 02 are. Bantu languages are usually divided into west and east bantu. The bantu languages are a very large group, belonging to the benuecongo family of the nigercongo phylum, which comprises between 250 to 500 members spread over most of subsaharan africa. Guthrie, the classification of the bantu languages 1948, repr. Researchers in bantu languages have identified syntagmatic features that occur in most bantu languages, which include nominal classes and concords. Bantu, swahili, xhosa, zulu, lingala, second language acquisition, morphosyntax, phonology.