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Information about Bantu Languages

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Map showing the approximate distribution of Bantu vs. other Niger-Congo languages.
Bantu
Geographic
distribution:		 Subsaharan Africa, mostly Southern Hemisphere
Genetic
classification:		 }}
Subdivisions:
—
ISO 639-2:bnt


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.[1] Bantu languages are spoken basically east and south of the present day nation of Nigeria; i.e., 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[2]

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The approximate locations of the sixteen Bantu zones (with zone J included)


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, e.g., 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 has 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 [a book]'. 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 [1]
  • Example: in Swahili piga means "strike", pigapiga means "strike repeatedly".
Well-known names that have reduplication include

A list of common Bantu languages

The following is a short list of Bantu languages that may be relatively well known: 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 does not 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:

Other relevant links

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.

References

1. ^ [2]
2. ^ Maho 2001

External links

Sub-Saharan Africa is the term used to describe the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara desert. Geographically, the demarcation line is the southern edge of the Sahara Desert.
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Southern Hemisphere or southern hemisphere[1] is the half of a planet that is south of the equator—the word hemisphere literally means 'half ball'. It is also that half of the celestial sphere south of the celestial equator.
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A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language. As with biological families, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics.
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ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. The three-letter codes given for each language in this part of the standard are referred to as "Alpha-3" codes. There are 464 language codes in the list.
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Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek (March 8, 1827 - August 17, 1875) was a German linguist. His work included A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages and his great project jointly executed with Lucy Lloyd: The Bleek and Lloyd Archive of |xam and !kun texts.
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Carl Friedrich Michael Meinhof (July 23,1857 — February 11,1944) was a German linguist known as one of the first linguists to study African languages.

Early years and career

He was born in Barzwitz (current Polish Pomerania).
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Malcolm Guthrie (February 10, 1903 – November 22, 1972), professor of Bantu languages, is known primarily for his classification of Bantu languages (Guthrie 1971). The classification, although certainly not undisputed, is still the most widely used.
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SIL International is a worldwide non-profit evangelical Christian organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document lesser-known languages in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy and aid minority language development.
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Grammar is the study of the rules governing the use of a given natural language, and as such a field of linguistics. Traditionally, grammar included morphology and syntax, in modern linguistics commonly expanded by the subfields of phonetics, phonology, orthography, semantics, and
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An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a base morpheme such as a root or to a stem, to form a word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed.
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Note:
  • All examples marked with ‡ are included in the audio samples. If a table caption is marked then all Sesotho examples in that table are included in the audio samples.

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In linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly
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In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once.
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Swahili (also called Kiswahili; see below for derivation) is a Bantu language. It is the most widely spoken language of sub-Saharan Africa. Although only 5-10 million people speak it as their native language[1]
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Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world.

In the English language, singular and plural are the only grammatical numbers.

In English, nouns, pronouns, and demonstratives inflect for plurality.
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For the computer operating system, see .
A syllable (Ancient Greek: συλλαβή) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds.
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In linguistics, a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups /spl/ and /ts/
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English}}} 
Writing system: Latin (English variant) 
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Official language of: 53 countries
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: en
ISO 639-2: eng
ISO 639-3: eng  
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Chichewa}}} 
Official status
Official language of: Malawi
Regulated by: unknown
Language codes
ISO 639-1: ny
ISO 639-2: nya
ISO 639-3: nya Chichewa (Chicheŵa in Malawian English, also known as
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In phonetics, epenthesis (/əˈpɛnθəsɪs/, Greek epi "on" + en "in" + thesis "putting") is the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word.
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A loanword (or loan word) is a word directly taken into one language from another with little or no translation. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept whereby it is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself.
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This article contains Japanese text.
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Japanese
日本語
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Swahili (also called Kiswahili; see below for derivation) is a Bantu language. It is the most widely spoken language of sub-Saharan Africa. Although only 5-10 million people speak it as their native language[1]
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Shona (or ChiShona) is native language of Zimbabwe and southern Zambia; the term is also used to identify those Bantu-language speaking peoples in Southern Africa who speak one of the Shona language dialects, namely Zezuru, Karanga, Manyika, Ndau and Korekore.
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Zulu}}} 
Official status
Official language of: South Africa
Swaziland
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: zu
ISO 639-2: zul
ISO 639-3: zul

Zulu (called isiZulu
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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. All languages use intonation to express emphasis, contrast, emotion, or other such elements, but not every language uses tone to distinguish lexical meaning.
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Reduplication, in linguistics, is a morphological process by which the root or stem of a word, or only part of it, is repeated.

Reduplication is used both in inflections to convey a grammatical function, such as plurality, intensification, etc.
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South Africa

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