Bantu main map (212 KB)
On classifying
Bantu languages
General
Referential classifications
Historical classifications
Appendix
The
Bantu languages of Africa
The Bantu
languages of Africa—northwestern area
References
General
According to the most recent estimate
(Grimes 2000) the world has 6,809 languages, of which 2,058, approximately 30%,
are spoken in Africa (an additional 44 are described as “extinct”). Africa is
home to the world’s largest language phylum, Niger-Congo, with 1,489
languages (the next largest being Austronesian, with a mere 1,262). If we
accept the figure of 750 million as Africa’s population size today, then
some 400 million Africans speak Niger-Congo languages, of whom about 240
million have a Bantu language as their first language (the figure includes
Grassfields). That is, nearly a third of all Africans speak a Bantu language as
their native language.
Readers should treat any claim about the number of languages as having general but not absolute validity. The main difficulty is, what is language and what is dialect? The conventional answer says that a language tends to be the standard variety, be written, have more speakers, have some form of offical status, have prestige, and not be intelligible to speakers of other “languages”. By contrast, dialects are not the standard, not written, have fewer speakers, have no offical status, have little or no prestige, and are mutually intelligible. In sub-Saharan Africa, as elsewhere, these distinctions are only partly true and in any case any distinction between language and dialect is part linguistic, part political, part prestige-related. There is a cline of linguistic difference between the similar and the dissimilar, and since no one knows exactly where to cut a cline, it is hard to state with accuracy the total of Bantu “languages”. This uncertainy can be seen by considering recent estimates of “Bantu language” numbers: Guthrie (1967–1971) names some 440 Bantu “varieties”, Grimes (2000) has 501, Bastin et al. (1999) have 542, Maho (forthcoming) has some 660, and Mann, Dalby et al. (1987) have ca. 680.
Bantu-speaking communities live in Africa south of a line from Nigeria in the west, across the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC: formerly Zaire), Uganda, and Kenya, to southern Somalia in the east. Most language communities between that line and the southern tip of Africa are Bantu. The exceptions are pockets: in the south, some small and fast dwindling Khoisan communities; in Tanzania one, maybe two, Khoisan outliers; in the northeast of the area, larger communities speaking Cushitic (part of Afro-Asiatic); and along and inside the northern border many communities speaking Nilo-Saharan languages and Adamawa-Ubangian (Niger-Congo but non-Bantu) languages. Communities speaking Bantu languages are indigenous to twenty-seven African countries: Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, CAR, Comoros, Congo, DRC, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mayotte, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages are spoken north and mainly west of Bantu. Starting in the north of the DRC, they stretch west across the CAR, Cameroon, Nigeria, and right across all west Africa as far as Senegal.
While agreed in general that Bantu is one of several families that make up Niger-Congo, linguists are not agreed on what exactly defines Bantu within Niger-Congo. The main difficulty lies in eastern Nigeria. Current interpretations suggest that some five millenia ago (Vansina 1995) the ancestral Bantu community left its homeland astride the Nigeria-Cameroon borderland and diffused south and east across the rainforest, reaching roughly its full contemporary distribution by the early centuries of our era. The descendants of the communities which moved away, those who now live in central, eastern, and southern Africa, lost contact with their old Niger-Congo neighbors. Those who stayed behind, or didn’t move very far, the so-called northwestern Bantu languages, have interacted linguistically with these Niger-Congo neighbors for five thousand years, or longer. The result is that the northwestern languages have become less like their Bantu siblings and more like their Niger-Congo cousins, to the point where it is hard to draw an unambiguous line between them. This is yet to be resolved (see Williamson and Blench 2000), for an overview and a very recent statement).
Classifications of the internal relationships of language families are of various types: areal, typological, genetic/historical, and referential. This article deals only with the last two. The period starting with Guthrie's Comparative Bantu (1967–1971) has seen well over thirty attempts to classify some or all of the Bantu languages, excluding recent work concerned with the position of Bantu within Niger-Congo. Most are either explicitly nonhistorical/referential or cover only part of the area. Only a few have tried to provide a picture of the historical development of the whole Bantu area and a majority of languages.
Referential
classifications
Referential classifications aim primarily at
providing a practical referential taxonomy, something obviously necessary for
such a large family. While the last two decades or so have seen other internal
referential classifications of Bantu (e.g. Mann, Dalby et al. 1987, Grimes
2000), undoubtedly the most influential has been that of Guthrie. His thinking
went through various adjustments from 1948 to 1967–1971 (of which an
updated version can be found in Maho (forthcoming)). The final version divided
the (Narrow) Bantu area into 15 “zones” of roughly equal size,
labelled A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, K, L, M, N, P, R, S, to which Belgian scholars
later added a J, by combining bits of D and E. The zones in turn consist of up
to nine groups, numbered 10, 20, 30, etc., and each group also has up to nine
members, mostly very similar to each other. Thus zone A is the first of his
zones (it happens to be in the northwest), A20 is a group of very similar
languages within A, and A24 refers to the language Duala (small letters after
the number refer to dialects, e.g. A11a, or A15b). His method was partly
geographical, partly linguistic, in that he started with a language or a small
group of languages and looked around for languages having “similar”
features. These were fitted into groups, and the groups into zones. If the
zones got too large or unwieldy, another zone was formed. The accompanying map
shows these zones. The linguistic features have little genetic validity, which
was as he intended—it was a practical, not a historical statement. And
since they are based on nongenetic features, the zones themselves have little
historical validity, although the smaller groups often have more validity, both
typological and historical. Many scholars feel it is useful to keep
Guthrie’s referential classification (or a modified version of it), while
searching for a more accurate representation. To modify it once is to modify it
many times, leading to confusion.
Historical classifications
Different scholars have different purposes and methods when they talk of historical
or genetic classifications. A good historical classification of a language family
ought to show two things. First, it will represent the genealogy of its members.
That is, assuming that most or all of the members of a language family derive
from a common ancestor, a historical classification will represent this, and
the various splittings and branchings that occurred since that ancestor. The
commonest way of representing is via what is called a family tree diagram. But
such a tree diagram is a rather static model, so the second thing that a historical
classification should try to reflect is the various changes that have occurred
and the various contacts that the family members have undergone—it is hard
to do this via a family tree.
Seeking to correct Guthrie’s historical perspective, or lack of it, a series of scholars have proposed alternatives over the last thirty years (for an overview, see Nurse 1994). Many have relied on the use of lexicostatistics (e.g. Heine 1973, Bastin et al. 1999). A language may split into two (or more) dialects, later two languages. As they move through time, they share progressively less vocabulary. The more vocabulary they share, the more recent the split; the less they share, the more distant the split. Lexicostatistics is based on counting these shared words and is thus a measure of lexical similarity and retention. Other scholars have relied on the use of shared lexical innovations (new words) and on shared loanwords (borrowed words) (see Ehret 1998).
Most of these classifications share two results. They, the majority, see (1) the northwestern languages (those of Zones A, B, C, and parts of D and H) as being clearly distinct from the rest; and (2) thereafter, a split in the rest between western (Zones H, K, R, sometimes L and parts of M) and eastern languages. Readers should read these classifications with care, as western and eastern often go under different names and have different membership. These linguistic splits lead to the historical interpretation that the original Bantu community first split into the northwestern languages versus the remainder, and later the remainder split into a western and an eastern group.
The fact that these classifications have similar results is linked to the fact that they share similar (lexically-based) methods. Any approach based solely on the use of words has to be suspect because words are the linguistic feature most easily borrowed, so linguists can never be completely sure whether a word is shared by two languages because it is inherited by both or borrowed in one or both. Linguists agree that lexicostatistics is but a preliminary step to a lasting classification, which should be based on groups of languages, at different levels within a family, sharing common (non-lexical) innovations. Work of this kind has scarcely begun (e.g. Nurse and Philippson (forthcoming) has a set of suggestions) and it seems likely that this is the direction of the next decade or two, work in which a role could well be played by SIL, with its large group of field-workers and field data. A final linguistically-based historical classification of the Bantu languages has to be regarded as work in progress.
Bastin, Y, A. Coupez, and M. Mann. 1999. Continuity and Divergence in the Bantu Languages: Perspectives from a Lexicostatistic Study. Tervuren. MRAC.
Ehret, C. E. 1998. An African classical age: Eastern and southern Africa in world history, 1000BC to AD 400. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Grimes, B. F. (ed.). 2000. Ethnologue. Dallas. SIL International. 2 vols.
Guthrie, M. 1948. The classification of the Bantu languages. London: IAI/OUP. Reprint 1967.
Guthrie, M. 1967. Comparative Bantu. Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers Ltd. Vols. 1–4.
Heine, B. 1973. “Zur genetischen Gliederung der Bantusprachen”. Afrika und Uebersee l06, 3: l64–185.
Heine, B., and D. Nurse (eds.). 2000. African languages. Cambridge: CUP.
Maho, J. forthcoming. “A revised version of Guthrie’s classification of Bantu.” In D. Nurse and G. Philippson (eds).
Mann, M., and D. Dalby, et al. 1987. A Thesaurus of African Languages. London: Hans Zell Publishers.
Nurse, D. 1994. “Historical classifications of the Bantu languages.” Azania 29/30: 65–81.
Nurse, D. 1997. “The contributions of linguistics to the study of history in Africa.” Journal of African History (38)3:359–391.
Nurse, D., and G. Philippson (eds.). forthcoming. The Bantu languages. London: Curzon Press.
Nurse, D., and G. Philippson. forthcoming. “Towards a historical classification of the Bantu languages.” In D. Nurse, and G. Philippson (eds.).
Vansina, J. 1995. “New linguistic evidence and the Bantu expansion.” Journal of African History 36: 173–195.
Williamson, K. and R. Blench. 2000. Niger-Congo. In B. Heine, and D. Nurse (eds.). 11–42.
