ABSTRACT
The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the end of most of the great exploratory journeys into that part of Africa which lies to the south of the Equator. As early as 1862 Bleek drew the attention of scholars to the fact that there was a startling family resemblance between widely separated languages in this area. One difficulty that had to be faced arose from the fact that some languages have been called by more than one name. This has been dealt with in two ways. In any study of the Bantu languages in general the problem of orthography becomes very difficult. It is clear that the considerations governing the designing of a practical orthography do not necessarily operate in this case. One of the biggest difficulties in a general study of the Bantu languages arises from the existence of five vowel languages side by side with the seven-vowel languages.
