Proto-Bantu is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Bantu languages, a subgroup of the Southern Bantoid languages.^[2] It is thought to have originally been spoken in West/Central Africa in the area of what is now Cameroon.^[3] About 6,000 years ago, it split off from Proto-Southern Bantoid when the Bantu expansion began to the south and east.^[4] Two theories have been put forward about the way the languages expanded: one is that the Bantu-speaking people moved first to the Congo region and then a branch split off and moved to East Africa; the other (more likely) is that the two groups split from the beginning, one moving to the Congo region, and the other to East Africa.^[3]

Like other proto-languages, there is no record of Proto-Bantu. Its words and pronunciation have been reconstructed by linguists. From the common vocabulary which has been reconstructed on the basis of present-day Bantu languages, it appears that agriculture, fishing, and the use of boats were already known to the Bantu people before their expansion began, but iron-working was still unknown. This places the date of the start of the expansion somewhere between 3000 BC and 800 BC.^[5]

A minority view casts doubt on whether Proto-Bantu, as a unified language, actually existed in the time before the Bantu expansion, or whether Proto-Bantu was not a single language but a group of related dialects. One scholar, Roger Blench, writes: "[...] [t]he argument from comparative linguistics which links the highly diverse languages of zone A to a genuine reconstruction is non-existent. Most claimed [P]roto-Bantu is either confined to particular subgroups, or is widely attested outside Bantu proper."^[6] According to this hypothesis, Bantu is actually a polyphyletic group that combines a number of smaller language families which ultimately belong to the (much larger) Southern Bantoid language family.

Urheimat

The homeland of Proto-Bantu was most likely in the upland forest fringes around the Sanaga and Nyong rivers of Southern Cameroon.^[7][8][9] It was formerly thought that proto-Bantu originated somewhere in the border region between Nigeria and Cameroon. However, new research revealed that was more likely the original area of Proto-Southern Bantoid, before it spread southwards into Cameroon long before Proto-Bantu emerged.^[10][11][12]

Phonology

Proto-Bantu is generally reconstructed to have a relatively small inventory of 11 consonants and 7 vowels.^[13]

Morphology

Vocabulary

During the last hundred years, beginning with Carl Meinhof and his students, great efforts have been made to examine the vocabulary of the approximately 550 present day Bantu languages and to try to reconstruct the proto-forms from which they presumably came. Among other recent works is that by Bastin, Coupez, and Mann, which assembled comparative examples of 92 different words from all the 16 language zones established by Guthrie.^[18][19]

Although some words are found only in certain of the Guthrie zones, others are found in every zone. These include for example *mbʊ́à 'dog', *-lia 'eat', *ma-béele 'breasts', *i-kúpa 'bone', *i-jína 'name', *-genda 'walk', *mʊ-kíla 'tail', *njɪla 'path', and so on.^[19] (The asterisks show that these are reconstructed forms, indicating how the words are presumed to have been pronounced before the Bantu expansion began.)

Other vocabulary items tend to be found in either one or the other of the two main Bantu dialect groups, the Western group (mainly covering Guthrie zones A, B, C, H, K, L, R) or the Eastern group (covering zones D, E, F, G, M, N, P, and S). Words reconstructed for these two groups are known as "Proto-Bantu A" ("PB-A") and "Proto-Bantu B" ("PB-B") respectively, whereas those which extend over the whole Bantu area are known as "Proto-Bantu X" (or "PB-X").^[20]

Building on the work done by A. E. Meeussen in the 1960s, a publicly searchable database of all the Bantu vocabulary items which have been established or proposed so far is maintained by the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren in Belgium (see External links).

See also

• Proto-Niger–Congo language

References

External links

Look up Appendix:List of Proto-Bantu reconstructions in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• A. E. Meeussen "Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions" Africana Linguistica 3, 1967. pp. 79–121.
• "Bantu Lexical Reconstructions 3". Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren. Searchable database of reconstructed Proto-Bantu words.
• Bostoen, Koen & Bastin, Yvonne (2016). "Bantu lexical reconstruction". Oxford Handbooks Online. An account of the history and main principles of reconstructing Proto-Bantu vocabulary.
• Proto-Bantu Swadesh list Archived 2021-08-08 at the Wayback Machine (Schadeberg 2003)
• Bostoen, Koen, de Schryver, Gilles-Maurice, Guérois, Rozenn & Pacchiarotti, Sara (eds.). 2022. On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar. (Niger-Congo Comparative Studies 4). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7560553 https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/373 Open Access.