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| Proto-Bantu | |
|---|---|
| Reconstruction of | Bantu languages |
| Region | Sanaga and Nyong river regions of Southern Cameroon |
| Era | ca. 4500–4000 BC[1] |
Reconstructed ancestor | |
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: "The argument from comparative linguistics which links the highly diverse languages of zone A to a genuine reconstruction is non-existent. Most claimed Proto-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.
- ^ Klieman, Kairn A. (19 December 2003). The Pygmies Were Our Compass: Bantu and Batwa in the History of West Central Africa, Early Times to C. 1900. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 43. ISBN 978-0-325-07104-6.
- ^ Erhet & Posnansky, eds. (1982), Newman (1995)
- ^ a b Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. (2011). Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages, pp. 337ff.
- ^ Newman (1995), Shillington (2005)
- ^ Vansina (1995) quoted by Schadeberg, T. C. in Nurse, D. & Philippson, G. (eds) (2006) The Bantu Languages, p. 160.
- ^ Blench, Roger [1]. Paper circulated before the Niger-Congo conference of September 2012.