Linguistic evidence regarding bantu origins the journal. Presentational focus and thematic structure in comparative. In a recent study of nigercongo, watters 1989 has given a detailed account of various classifications of bantu and bmtoid. Suprasegmental features are relative and determined across segments. It was pointed out as early as 1886 that a wide range of. Bantu words in american english terms you should know for week 11 part 02 are. Middle passage bantu languages slang black english africanamerican vernacular english play the dozens. As far as i can see lexical similarity doesnt seem that high amongst most bantu languages. Nguni is one of five language groups which comprise the southeastern bantu languages. Second language acquisition of bantu languages jstor. Bantu words in american english montclair state university. The type of approach which is used to determine the origin of the bantu languages is a. These languages are clearly related to neighboring language groups also termed bantu. The bantu languages are a large family of languages spoken by the bantu peoples throughout.
Suprasegmental features segmental features are generally easy to determine in isolation. Twelve bantu languages are spoken by more than five million people, including rundi, rwanda, shona, xhosa, and zulu. The primary evidence for this expansion has been linguistic, namely that the languages spoken in subequatorial africa are remarkably similar to each other. Included are those languages that constitute at least 1% of the population and have at least 10% the number of speakers of the largest bantu language in the country. This is how you say what you want to say, or the words a writer chooses to clearly and effectively express ideas or to evoke a particular mood. Language, tone, and audience university of saint joseph. However, languages vary with respect to what morphological processes are available, how frequently they are used, and what types of information can be encoded in these processes. Nigercongo, voltacongo, benuecongo, eastern benuecongo, south bantoid, bantu. If youre looking for a free download links of the bantu languages routledge language family series pdf, epub, docx and torrent then this site is not for you. The following description is based primarily on the speech of mr. The bantu expansion is the name for a postulated millennialong series of migrations of speakers of the original proto bantu language group. If we consider word stems in bantu languages, what one observes is that each word consists of an. Bantu language speakers and their languages share similarities in structure, grammar, and key words.
The acquisition of bantu languages katherine demuth brown. Relative clause formation in the bantu languages of south africa jochen zeller linguistics programme, faculty of human sciences, university of kwazulunatal, king george v avenue, glenwood, durban 4041, south africa email. The interrelatedness between and characteristic features of members of the african language family. There are around 500 bantu languages in africa, spoken in an area ranging from near nigeria to southern somalia and south to the tip of the continent.
The comparison is based on 27 morphophonological and. New developments in the classification of bantu languages and their. Journal of african languages and linguistics 18, 119. Although language is universal, each language has evolved to meet the experiences, needs, and desires of a particular community. This is the third in the valuable series of linguistic works currently being issued. The acquisition of swahili verbal morphology kamil ud deen ucla abstract recently, much attention has focused on the socalled root infinitiveri phenomenon, where children in languages such as german use infinitival verbs in root context, seemingly optionally. Southern africa history, countries, map, population. How much lexical similarity is there in the bantu languages. The nguni languages are group of bantu languages spoken in southern africa by the nguni people. One of the features of the first edition of the index developed to characterise situations where there are groups. We argue that the contactinduced changes observed in the southwestern bantu languages can be partly accounted for by the language shift of native khoisan speakers who imposed certain features.
A brief summary of the bantu acquisition literature by language is provided below. It is probably the origin of rap and has its own origin in the. One bantu language, swahili, is used as a lingua franca in east africa by about 50 to 100 million people. Given that there are approximately 400 of these closely related languages, it should come as no surprise that these people are incredibly diverse, and that societies and governments among bantus can be radically different. This article discusses verbal relative clauses in the bantu languages spoken. In this paper, we describe important characteristics and major actional distinctions attested across bantu languages. Bantu, swahili, xhosa, zulu, lingala, second language acquisition, morphosyntax, phonology. Linguistically, these languages belong to the southern bantoid branch of benuecongo, one of the language families grouped within the nigercongo phylum. Click download or read online button to the classification of the bantu languages book pdf for free now. From his research, swahili is proven to be a bantu language that shares the same proto language with the other bantu languages. Studies in african linguistics tone in kikamba and the. Khoisan speakers, who have inhabited the region for millennia, have now been displaced in many areas by bantu. The 2016 revision key findings and advance tables pdf. Phonetic analysis of afrikaans, english, xhosa and zulu.
The black peoples of southern africathe overwhelming majority of the regions populationcan be divided into speakers of two language families, khoisan and bantu. From the precolonial to the modern day eolss, toyin falola. Kiango university of dar es salaam, tanzania abstract the headword of a dictionary entry serves different functions. I presented these results in a talk at the west african language congress at ibadan in 1964. Some languages have limited syllabic nasals and coda syllable. Download pdf the classification of the bantu languages. Morph syntactic analysis of verb inflections in igikuria. Other major languages of the group, each with 10 million speakers or more, are rwanda, luba, nyanja, shona, and zulu. Bantu languages have a number of features that are of interest to l2 researchers. Linguistic ties between ancient egyptian and bantu x not generally the case in the ancient egyptian language. Michael mulwa of mbiuni sublocation, mblimbuni location, machakos district. The swahili morphology is similar to that of other bantu languages. View bantu linguistics research papers on academia. Malcolm guthrie, the classification of the bantu languages.
All nouns are assigned to a noun class, where the number of noun classes varies between 12 and 20. Swahili, which is spoken by five million people as a mother tongue and some 30 million as a second language, is a bantu lingua. Suprasegmental features length pitch stress summary segmental vs. Computational modeling of bantu natural language from very early studies of bantu languages that. Bantu languages, lexical comparison, morphosyntactic comparison, automated cognate judgement, subgrouping.
Single suprasegmental features may occur over a single segment or a sequence of segments. All languages share universal features, such as the abil. Apparently in the parent language this particle had already these alternative forms, which resemble those in some west african negro languages. Both xhosa and zulu belong to the bantu language family, which is prevalent throughout africa south of the equator wentzel et al. Bantu are the speakers of bantu languages, comprising several hundred indigenous ethnic groups in subsaharan africa, spread over a vast area from central africa across the african great lakes to southern africa. She proposes that aspect and tense features exist in this language. Kikamba is a bantu language like igikuria and relevant data on the verb will be used in this study. Grammatical and lexical comparison of the greater ruvu. Bantu languages are conventionally classified into zones designated by letters a through s, following criteria and an enumeration of languages in guthrie 196771.
Bantu languages root, prefix, prefixes, vowel and language. New developments in the classification of bantu languages. An atlas of nigerian languages roger blench may be freely quoted but please acknowledge source 3rd. Kikamba is a bantu language of kenya, spoken by over 1 million people over a wide area east of nairobi as far as, in places, the coast. It is wellknown that a number of bantu languages distinguish at least two different ways of expressing verbal negation depending on the clause type the predicate occurs in. All nouns are assigned to a noun class, where the number of noun classes. Language, tone, and audience significantly affect how we communicate our ideas in our writing. The chapter furthermore shows how bantu languages, despite their shared basic svo word order. In africa today there are more than 400 bantu languages all linked. West mrican languages exhibited nounclass features analogous to those classified.
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 bantu languages, from the nigercongo language family, blend with arabic, creating a new language called swahili which become a widely spoken language among the peoples of east africa. Relative clause formation in the bantu languages of south. The term bantu people is used to describe the roughly 60 million africans who speak languages in the bantu language family. Mbugua 2008 in her study of the morphosyntax of the maasai valence using the minimalist approach provides. Nguni languages mainly include zulu, xhosa, ndebele sometimes referred to as northern ndebele, swati, hlubi, phuthi, bhaca, lala, nhlangwini, southern transvaal ndebele, and sumayela ndebele. A common characteristic of bantu languages is that they use words such as muntu or mutu for human being or. The bantu languages are attractive to the explorer not only from the harmonious adjustment of vowels and consonants, but from the logic of their grammatical structure, which, in the majority of these tongues, provides for a wide range and a nice. 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.
An attempt at a full list of bantu languages with various conflations and a puzzlingly diverse nomenclature can be found in the bantu languages of africa, 1959. The vast majority of african languages are tonal, and perhaps most also have vowel harmony especially the type known as atr harmony. There is no mistaking a bantu language, which perhaps is what renders the study of this group so interesting and encouraging. Pdf study of bantu languages morphology of lingala. Obviously languages like zulu and xhosa have a high level of lexical similarity but thats because theyre arguably dialects of the same language. For example, when constructing a syllable just like in all other bantu languages there are seven structures i.
Pdf the genesis of verbal negation in bantu and its. 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. The classification of the bantu languages download the classification of the bantu languages ebook pdf or read online books in pdf, epub, and mobi format. The bantu languages routledge language family series pdf. This article discusses lexical and grammatical comparison and subgrouping in a set of closely related bantu language varieties in the morogoro region, tanzania 1. One of the bestknown features of the bantu languages is their noun class system. Understanding language structure and use provides teachers with essential tools to help students learn. Swahili, which is spoken by five million people as a mother tongue and some 30 million as a second language, is a bantu lingua franca important in both commerce and literature. English has been argued to be an ri language wexler 1994, though. These languages are clearly related to neighboring language groups also termed bantu, such as jarawan, mamfe, grassfields, and ekoid, and constitute a node on a highly. Presentational focus and thematic structure in comparative bantu.