ABSTRACT
The Bantu languages dominate the southern half of the African land mass and are spoken as first languages by an estimated 220 million speakers, nearly a third of Africa’s total population. In their geographical extent, they come into contact with representatives of all the other major African language families: Cushitic (of Afroasiatic superstock) and Nilo-Saharan languages in the north-east, Khoisan in the south (and minimally in the north-east due to the retention of the Khoisan language Sandawe in north-eastern Tanzania, surrounded by Bantu languages) and its closest relatives among the Niger-Congo languages in the north-west. The Bantu languages are thought to have originally spread from the West African tran-
sitional area of eastern Nigeria and Cameroon, which now marks the westernmost expansion of Bantu in Africa. From this area Bantu languages were carried eastward and southward in several waves of migration, responsible for the oldest dialect divisions among the languages, and starting no later than the early centuries of the first millennium AD. It was early recognised, for example, that a major dialect division is into West and East Bantu, symptomatised by the distinction between reflexes of the lexical item ‘two’: ProtoWest *bàdé and Proto-East *bèdé. West Bantu shows more syntactic diversity than East Bantu, particularly in the north-west, where the morphological richness of the majority of Bantu languages begins to give way to the more isolating syntactic tendencies of the neighbouring Benue-Congo and Kwa languages of Nigeria, e.g. the passive verbal suffix *-ois totally replaced by the impersonal construction, i.e. ‘they saw me’ replaces ‘I was seen’. The vast majority of the speakers of Bantu languages are directly involved in agricultural
production. In this they contrast traditionally with the hunters and herders they came into contact with from other language families in much of their present areas, frequently effecting language shift on earlier populations, whether or not the latter maintained their modes of production. More recently, the agricultural majority also contrasts with the growing number of city dwellers involved in distribution and services, as the rapid urbanisation of Bantu Africa continues.
