Everything about The Bantu Language totally explained
The
Bantu languages (technically
Narrow Bantu languages) constitute a grouping belonging to the
Niger-Congo family. This grouping is deep down in the genealogical tree of the Bantoid grouping, which in turn is deep down in the Niger-Congo tree. By one estimate, there are 513 languages in the Bantu grouping, 681 languages in Bantoid, and 1,514 in Niger-Congo. Bantu languages are spoken largely east and south of the present day nation of Nigeria; for example, in the regions commonly known as central Africa, east Africa, and southern Africa. Parts of this Bantu chunk of Africa also have languages from outside the Niger-Congo family (see map).
The word Bantu was first used by
Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek (
1827-
1875) with the meaning 'people', as this is reflected in many of the languages of this group. A common characteristic of Bantu languages is that they use a stem form such as
-ntu or
-tu for 'person', and the plural prefix for people in many languages is
ba-, together giving
ba-ntu "people". Bleek, and later
Carl Meinhof, pursued extensive comparative studies of Bantu language grammars.
Classification of the Bantu languages
The classification of the Bantu languages is still in an incipient state. There still is no well founded genetic classification. The most widely used system, the alphanumeric coding system developed by
Malcolm Guthrie, is mainly areal. In recent decades, there have been at least two proposals for a genetic classification system to replace the Guthrie system. The "Tervuren" proposal of Bastin, Coupez, and Mann suffers from inferior methodology (its reliance on the "lexicostatistic" method) and the
SIL proposal suffers from failure of its creators to publish their methodology. The Guthrie system needs to be updated, for example, by the addition of languages previously overlooked. A classification system for a grouping of languages must be genetic to be scientifically valid; but for the time being, the development of a rigorous genetic classification of many subdivisions of Niger-Congo is hampered by insufficient data. Progress in this field depends on the production of extensive dictionaries for many more member languages.
The Guthrie, Tervuren, and SIL lists are compared side by side in
Maho 2002
.
Language structure
The phoneme inventory of Proto-Bantu and its core vocabulary were reconstructed by Guthrie.
The most prominent
grammatical characteristic of Bantu languages is the extensive use of
affixes (see
Sesotho grammar and
Luganda language for detailed discussions of these affixes). Each noun belongs to a
class, and each language may have several numbered classes, somewhat like
genders in European languages. The class is indicated by a prefix on the noun, as well as on verbs and qualificative roots agreeing with it. Plural is indicated by a change of prefix.
The verb has a number of prefixes. In
Swahili, for example,
Mtoto mdogo amekisoma means 'The small child has read it [abook]'.
Mtoto 'child' governs the adjective prefix
m- and the verb subject prefix
a-. Then comes perfect tense
-me- and an object marker
-ki- agreeing with implicit
kitabu 'book'. Pluralizing to 'children' gives
Watoto wadogo wamekisoma, and
pluralizing to 'books' (
vitabu) gives it
Watoto wadogo wamevisoma.
Bantu words are typically made up of
open syllables of the type CV (consonant-vowel) with most languages having syllables exclusively of this type. The morphological shape of Bantu words is typically CV, VCV, CVCV, VCVCV, etc; that is, any combination of CV (with possibly a V- syllable at the start). In other words, a strong claim for this language family is that almost all words end in a vowel, precisely because closed syllables (CVC) are not permissible. This tendency to avoid
consonant clusters is important when words are imported from
English or other non-Bantu languages. An example from
Chichewa: the word "school", borrowed from English, and then transformed to fit the sound patterns of this language, is
sukulu. That is,
sk- has been broken up by inserting an
epenthetic -u-;
-u has also been added at the end of the word. Another example is
buledi for "bread". Similar effects are seen in
loanwords for other non-African CV languages like
Japanese.
The Bantu language with the largest number of speakers is
Swahili (G 40), while the Bantu languages with the most
native speakers are
Shona and
Zulu. Judging from the history of Swahili, some linguists believe that Bantu languages are on a continuum from purely
tonal languages to languages with no tone at all.
Reduplication
Reduplication is a common morphological phenomenon in Bantu languages and is usually used to indicate frequency of the action signalled by the (unreduplicated) verb stem
(External Link)
A list of common Bantu languages
The following is a short list of Bantu languages that may be relatively well known:
in Central and Eastern Africa
in Southern Africa
in West Africa
- Basaa (in Cameroon)
- Kako (in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo)
- Ngumba (in Cameroon)
- Beti (in Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, São Tomé and Príncipe)
Most are known in English without the class prefix (Swahili, Tswana, Ndebele), but are sometimes used with the (language-specific) prefix (Kiswahili, Setswana, Sindebele). The bare (prefixless) form typically doesn't occur in the language itself. So, in the country of Botswana the people are the Batswana, 'one person' is a 'Motswana', and the language is 'Setswana'.
Today most Bantu linguists would regard the southwards migration, or Bantu expansion, that started about 2000 years before present as originating in the region of eastern Nigeria or Cameroon.
Bantu words popularised in western cultures
Some words from various Bantu languages have been borrowed into western languages. These include:
Agogô
Askari
Banjo
Bongos
Bomba
Bwana
Candombe
Conga
Gumbo
Hakuna matata
Jenga
Jumbo
Kalimba
Kwanzaa
Malaika
Mambo
Mbira
Marimba
Rumba
Safari
Samba
Simba
Ubuntu
Zombie
Other relevant links
Malcolm Guthrie
Meeussen's rule
Noun class
Bantu
List of Bantu languages
Bibliography
Guthrie, Malcolm. 1948. The classification of the Bantu languages. London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute.
Guthrie, Malcolm. 1971. Comparative Bantu, Vol 2. Farnborough: Gregg International.
Heine, Bernd. 1973. Zur genetische Gliederung der Bantu-Sprachen. Afrika und Übersee, 56: 164–185.
Maho, Jouni F. 2001. The Bantu area: (towards clearing up) a mess. Africa & Asia, 1:40–49.
Maho, Jouni F. 2002. Bantu lineup: comparative overview of three Bantu classifications. Göteborg University: Department of Oriental and African Languages.
Piron, Pascale. 1995. Identification lexicostatistique des groupes Bantoïdes stables. Journal of West African Languages, 25(2): 3–39.Further Information
Get more info on 'Bantu Language'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://bantu_languages.totallyexplained.com">Bantu languages Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
