One such phenomenon is vowel harmony, where suffixes typically alternate in height depending on the preceding vowel. Kiango university of dar es salaam, tanzania abstract the headword of a dictionary entry serves different functions. Over several millennia, the bantu have migrated in all directions, carrying the iron age into many areas of africa. Bantu languages, group of african languages forming a subdivision of the benueniger division of the nigercongo branch of the nigerkordofanian language family see african languages african languages, geographic rather than linguistic classification of languages spoken on the african continent. A high degree of variation is found amongst bantu languages in the encoding of negation within the clause. Grammatical and lexical comparison of the greater ruvu. If we consider word stems in bantu languages, what. 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. Second, distinct from the template, bantu languages sometimes show a tendency for specific suffixes to be ordered according to semantic compositionality, or scope.
Bantu peoples, the approximately 85 million speakers of the more than 500 distinct languages of the bantu subgroup of the nigercongo language family, occupying almost the entire southern projection of the african continent. Cultural diversity and the element of negation munzhedzi james mafela university of south africa, south africa abstract. The bantu languages, numbering as many as 500, have been at the center of cuttingedge theoretical research in phonology, morphology, syntax and. For example, nouns include noun class prefixes as well as stems whereas verbs include morphological reflexes of subject marking, object marking, tense, aspect, mood, causativity, and negation among others. Bantu languages spoken by more than million black africans are distributed across africa in a pattern strikingly similar to the distribution of early iron age archaeological sites see map at left. Bantu and wider nigercongo also differ structurally whereas what precedes the verb stem in bantu. Setswana is one of the bantu language groups, mostly spoken in botswana, south africa and namibia southern africa. Bantu languages, group of african languages forming a subdivision of the benueniger division of the nigercongo branch of the nigerkordofanian language family see african languages. Bantu language article about bantu language by the free. All bantu languages are agglutinating and consequently a bantu word includes rich, overt morphology. Download pdf the classification of the bantu languages.
For instance, whereas all bantu languages encode both aspect and tense, a majority of nigercongo families can best be analyzed in terms of aspect alone. Speakers of bantu languages are also found in the equatorial forest gray as far north as where forest gives way to savanna. How far can we get in a proposal for bantu nominal syntax when we apply an n analysis of gender to noun classes in this language family. Download pdf the bantu languages of africa free online. It is one of the socalled lacustrine languages, a group of languages that have drawn the attention of bantuists due to its location, that has favoured the in. Other areas of interest include afroasiatic, general phonology, linguistic classification and its. The linear ordering of tamneg markers in the bantu. The legends and traditions of the bantu peoples themselves in variably point to a northern origin, and a period, not wholly re moved from their racial remembrance, when they were strangers in their present lands.
The comparison is based on 27 morphophonological and morphosyntactic parameters, supplemented by a lexicon of 500 items. Jespersen cycles and negation in bantu languages a jespersen cycle is generally known as a process taking a language from a single sentential negator to a double sentential negator and then back to a single sentential negator. The acquisition of bantu languages katherine demuth brown. To show that analyzing gender as located on n in bantu languages gives new insight into bantu dp structure and provides further evidence for gender on n. Bantu languages root, prefix, prefixes, vowel and language.
In all, some 500 languages spoken today in that vast area are derived from the protobantu language. As seen, both in protobantu pb and in most bantu languages which have these suffixes, the default suffix ordering is causativeapplicativereciprocalpassive, or carp. As part of the southern bantoid group, they are part of the benuecongo language family, which in turn is part of the large niger. This chapter surveys the main phonological phenomena found in bantu languages. Anthropologists speculate that bantu and semibantu peoples migrated east and intermingled with sudanese blacks. The bantu migration refers to the movement across the african continent of the various speakers of bantu languages. Most bantu languages have tones which serve to make lexical andor grammatical distinctions. The classification is primarily linguistic, for the cultural patterns of. Introduction the inflectional morphology of the bantu verb has been the subject of many previous comparative and descriptive studies.
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. Negation in mokpe and two related coastal bantu languages of cameroon 205 ii there seem to be four different morphemes for negation in this language namely, zre, zro, zri and zra iii sometimes, the negative morpheme in. This paper uses historicalcomparative approaches in combination with quantitative methods to analyse data from a survey of varieties of the bantu languages herero and kuvale spoken by ethnically. Word recognition strategies amongst isixhosaenglish. Clausal arguments in bantu and beyond iii claire halpert lsa summer institute july 5august 2, 2017 1 selected c dependencies. Pdf the genesis of verbal negation in bantu and its.
This variation is seen in the use of a range of affixes 1, auxiliarybased constructions 2, independent words 3 and single, double and triple marking of negation see, e. The following lessons have been designed to suit any new learner in setswana who has had little or no exposure to setswana language. Negation in mokpe and two related coastal bantu languages of cameroon 205 ii there seem to be four different morphemes for negation in this language namely, zre, zro, zri and zra. Bantu words in american english montclair state university. 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. The primary evidence for this expansion has been linguistic, namely that the languages spoken in subequatorial africa are remarkably similar to each other. In favour of the tree model, bantu languages are thought to have spread and diversi. The areas in which are spoken bantu languages of typical structure and archaic form are somewhat widely spread. Bantu contains hundreds of languages that are spoken by 120 million africans in the congo basin, angola, the republic of south africa, mozambique, zimbabwe, zambia, malawi, tanzania, and kenya.
Communication, the process of sending and receiving messages to achieve understanding, is accomplished through language, verbal and nonverbal. Comparative morphosyntax the structural data that is of interest here comprise inflected verb forms, in fact any finite verb form marked for tense, aspect, mood, focus, negation, and so forth, be it by inflectional morphemes, auxiliaries, or both. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read the bantu languages. He has mainly worked on comparative bantu tonology. This category has the following 38 subcategories, out of 38 total. Morphologythe most distinctive morphological feature of bantu languages is the grouping of nouns in different classes, marked by a prefix. View bantu linguistics research papers on academia. This chapter does not intend to provide an overview of all aspects of the syntax of bantu languages for which see bearth 2003 and buell forthcoming, but instead aims to highlight current areas of interest and recent developments in the field of bantu syntactic research. All members of a given class share the same prefix. The bantu languages technically the narrow bantu languages, as opposed to wide bantu, a loosely defined categorization which includes other bantoid languages, are a large family of languages spoken by the bantu peoples throughout subsaharan africa. 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. Click download or read online button to the bantu languages of africa book pdf for free now. Middle passage bantu languages slang black english africanamerican vernacular english play the dozens.
Twelve bantu languages are spoken by more than five million people, including rundi, rwanda, shona, xhosa, and zulu. 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. In the discussion that follows, we seek to investigate these issues and then. Nata, or ekinata, is a bantu language spoken in the mara region, near lake victoria, in tanzania. The data derives chiefly from the published literature on bantu languages and covers some 120ish bantu languages from all socalled guthrie zones.
It is probably the origin of rap and has its own origin in the. Wikimedia commons has media related to bantu languages. Download the classification of the bantu languages ebook pdf or read online books in pdf, epub, and mobi format. Bantu words in american english terms you should know for week 11 part 02 are. Based on the criteria listed above, the languages of the stratified sample are grouped in 3 broad groups grammaticalized notyet markers 28 languages unclear status of grammaticalization for notyet expressions 9 languages the notyet sense is encoded by a phasal adverbialno evidence for a grammaticalized notyet. This collection brings together most of the worlds leading bantuists, as well as some of the most promising younger scholars interested in the history, comparison, and description of bantu languages. Our basic observation is that bantu languages have few genuine quantifiers. New developments in the classification of bantu languages. Click download or read online button to the classification of the bantu languages book pdf for free now.
The bantu expansion is the name for a postulated millennialong series of migrations of speakers of the original protobantu language group. The genesis of verbal negation in bantu and its dependency on functional features and clause types, in j. Linguistic ties between ancient egyptian and bantu x not generally the case in the ancient egyptian language. Pragmatics, function, ontology find, read and cite all the research you need on researchgate. The bantu languages of africa download the bantu languages of africa ebook pdf or read online books in pdf, epub, and mobi format. A comparative grammar of the south african bantu languages. Pdf an areal typology of clausefinal negation in africa. The greater ruvu bantu language varieties include kagulu g12, zigua g31, kwere g32, zalamo g33, nguu g34, luguru g35, kami g36 and kutu g37. Clausefinal negation markers cfnms, although typologically rare, can be found in a very wide range of languages of northern subsaharan africa. With these basics in place, we can move on to more specific issues in bantu syntax. Combinations of nasal plus consonant are also frequently subject to various modifications. 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. Eventually, the bantu dominated, with the exception of south africa and the namibian desert, all of the african continent south of a line crossing from southern nigeria to kenya.
248 681 205 37 1329 509 1057 49 1388 213 221 939 412 1376 583 719 18 1529 1079 30 683 1169 1175 951 473 890 1595 357 277 87 1595 700 1389 820 365 1078 441 825 81 482 1240 511 1456 834 602