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"Bantu languages Vocabulary."
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Mean Length of Utterance: A study of early language development in four Southern Bantu languages
Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) has been widely used to measure children’s early language development in a variety of languages. This study investigates the utility of MLU to measure language development in four agglutinative and morphologically complex Southern Bantu languages. Using a variant of MLU, MLU3, based on the three longest sentences children produced, we analysed the utterances of 448 toddlers (16-32 months) collected using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, a parent-report tool. MLU3, measured in words (MLU3-w) and morphemes (MLU3-m), significantly correlated with age and other indices of language growth (e.g., grammar and vocabulary). MLU3 measures also accounted for significant variance in language development particular morphosyntactic development. Our results suggest that MLU3-m is a more sensitive measure than MLU3-w. We conclude that MLU measured in morphemes provides a useful addition to other indices of language development in these kinds of morphologically complex languages.
Journal Article
Moving Histories: Bantu Language Expansions, Eclectic Economies, and Mobilities
This essay interprets a classification of Africa's Bantu languages which used statistical tools guided by assumptions about farming and its chronology to analyze fresh vocabulary evidence. It shows a peeling movement from Cameroon's grassfields, into southern Cameroon, then along a savanna corridor through West Central Africa's rainforests, into the Savannahs, then to Southern Africa, the Great Lakes, and Indian Ocean coast. The clear sequence of movement masks methodological and historical factors. Language death, multilingualism, and the limits of vocabulary evidence restrain the classification's authority. ‘Transformations’ from food collecting to food producing or from no metals to full engagement with metals were mutable, unfolded at different speeds, and involved interactions with firstcomers. In Central Africa, Bantu speakers were often the first farmers and metal-users in the region but elsewhere they were commonly neither. Their arrivals did not immediately displace firstcomers. Computational methods can accommodate many of these issues.
Journal Article
The Consonant Inventory of Proto-Tsonga-Copi
Recent studies have greatly furthered our understanding of the Southern Bantu languages, but questions about the internal relationships of the Southern Bantu language subgroups and the validity of the clade as a whole still remain. This study attempts to reconstruct the consonant inventory of one proposed genetic clade, that of Tsonga-Copi (S50–S60). Using published dictionaries and reference works for each language of the subgrouping, a corpus of cognate vocabulary was assembled. Each term was then matched, where possible, to a reconstruction in the Bantu Lexical Reconstructions 3 (BLR3) database. Sound correspondences were identified and used to reconstruct the consonant inventory of Proto-Tsonga-Copi. In addition to the discovery of several typologically unusual sound changes, the results of this study also lend support to existing and developing hypotheses about both the internal relationships of Southern Bantu clades, as well as the nature of language contact in (pre)historic Southern Africa, particularly the influence of Khoisan and other Bantu languages.
Journal Article
Inheritance and Contact in the Development of Lateral Obstruents in Nguni Languages (S40)
This study investigates the development of the lateral fricatives and affricates, to which we jointly refer as ‘lateral obstruents’, in Nguni (S40) languages of Southern Africa. These lateral obstruents, which include /ɬ, ⁿɬ, ɮ, ⁿɮ, k͡ʟ̝̊/, are rare in the Bantu language family, and are not reconstructed for Proto-Bantu. Lateral obstruents are also rare cross-linguistically. They do occur, however, in four sub-branches of Southern Bantu: Shona, Sotho-Tswana, Nguni, and Tsonga. In this paper, we study how Southern Bantu could have acquired such a large inventory of cross-linguistically rare phonemes by investigating their development in Nguni languages, a large but closely related cluster of languages in which lateral obstruents are very frequent. We analyze published data from nine Nguni languages, including languages for which the only available descriptions are dated or of limited scope, in which case we carefully assess the data and their analysis. On the basis of this large database, we show which lateral obstruents are used in Nguni, and the vocabulary in which they occur. Applying the Comparative Method, we show that alveolar lateral obstruents can be reconstructed to Proto-Nguni, where they are the regular reflex of Proto-Bantu palatals *c and *j. The velar lateral affricate, in contrast, cannot be reconstructed to Proto-Nguni, and finds its origin in loanwords, for example, from Khoe languages, where it is used as a click replacement strategy. As a result, we conclude that both inheritance and contact played a role in the development of lateral obstruents in Nguni, likely combined in the case of alveolar lateral obstruents. In order to better understand the contact history, we evaluate existing hypothesized contact scenarios to account for the presence of lateral obstruents in Southern Bantu or Nguni. Given that alveolar lateral obstruents result from a regular sound change, contact does not seem to be as prominent in the development of lateral obstruents as has been proposed before in the literature. This study lays the groundwork for future research into lateral obstruents in Southern Bantu.
Journal Article
Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology
For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organized. Kinship terminology is the structured vocabulary used to classify, refer to, and address relatives and family. Diversity in kinship terminology has been analyzed by anthropologists for over 150 years, although recurrent patterning across cultures remains incompletely explained. Despite the wealth of kinship data in the anthropological record, comparative studies of kinship terminology are hindered by data accessibility. Here we present Kinbank, a new database of 210,903 kinterms from a global sample of 1,229 spoken languages. Using open-access and transparent data provenance, Kinbank offers an extensible resource for kinship terminology, enabling researchers to explore the rich diversity of human family organization and to test longstanding hypotheses about the origins and drivers of recurrent patterns. We illustrate our contribution with two examples. We demonstrate strong gender bias in the phonological structure of parent terms across 1,022 languages, and we show that there is no evidence for a coevolutionary relationship between cross-cousin marriage and bifurcate-merging terminology in Bantu languages. Analysing kinship data is notoriously challenging; Kinbank aims to eliminate data accessibility issues from that challenge and provide a platform to build an interdisciplinary understanding of kinship.
Journal Article
The deep history of the number words
We have previously shown that the ‘low limit’ number words (from one to five) have exceptionally slow rates of lexical replacement when measured across the Indo-European (IE) languages. Here, we replicate this finding within the Bantu and Austronesian language families, and with new data for the IE languages. Number words can remain stable for 10 000 to over 100 000 years, or around 3.5–20 times longer than average rates of lexical replacement among the Swadesh list of ‘fundamental vocabulary’ items. Ordinal evidence suggests that number words also have slow rates of lexical replacement in the Pama–Nyungan language family of Australia. We offer three hypotheses to explain these slow rates of replacement: (i) that the abstract linguistic-symbolic processing of ‘number’ links to evolutionarily conserved brain regions associated with numerosity; (ii) that number words are unambiguous and therefore have lower ‘mutation rates’; and (iii) that the number words occupy a region of the phonetic space that is relatively full and therefore resist change because alternatives are unlikely to be as ‘good’ as the original word.
This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The origins of numerical abilities’.
Journal Article
Headedness and structure of Xitsonga compound words
Compound words, formed by combining two or more morphemes, play a significant role in Xitsonga’s lexicon. This study employs a descriptive qualitative approach to examine how the head and modifier(s) interact to contribute to the overall structure and meaning of compound words in Xitsonga. Data were collected through unobtrusive measures from secondary sources. The Construction Morphology and Pragmatic Theory framework underpins this study. This article has established three types of compound words in Xitsonga distinguished by headedness: endocentric, copulative and exocentric. The left-headedness of endocentric compounds, the equal contribution of constituents in copulative compounds, and the elusive nature of exocentric compounds highlight the versatility and complexity of Xitsonga compound word formation. The study also found that the richness of Xitsonga compounding lies in the intricate relationship between semantics and culture, as it creates categories by combining morphemes from various lexical categories, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, ideophones and adverbs. These findings prove that compounding is a productive process for creating new vocabularies in Xitsonga.ContributionThis study significantly enhances the understanding of Xitsonga morphology by systematically classifying compound words into endocentric, copulative and exocentric types based on headedness. It elucidates the equal and hierarchical roles of constituent morphemes, thereby highlighting the versatility and complexity of compound word formation in Xitsonga. The study also demonstrates the intricate relationship between semantics and cultural factors in the compounding process, showcasing how various lexical categories interact to create a rich and nuanced vocabulary.
Journal Article
Deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers
Human evolutionary history in Central Africa reflects a deep history of population connectivity. However, Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHGs) currently speak languages acquired from their neighbouring farmers. Hence it remains unclear which aspects of CAHG cultural diversity results from long-term evolution preceding agriculture and which reflect borrowing from farmers. On the basis of musical instruments, foraging tools, specialized vocabulary and genome-wide data from ten CAHG populations, we reveal evidence of large-scale cultural interconnectivity among CAHGs before and after the Bantu expansion. We also show that the distribution of hunter-gatherer musical instruments correlates with the oldest genomic segments in our sample predating farming. Music-related words are widely shared between western and eastern groups and likely precede the borrowing of Bantu languages. In contrast, subsistence tools are less frequently exchanged and may result from adaptation to local ecologies. We conclude that CAHG material culture and specialized lexicon reflect a long evolutionary history in Central Africa.
Genome-wide analyses reveal a deep history of musical instruments and specialized vocabulary among Central African hunter-gatherers and the long-term cultural interconnectivity of these groups before and after the Bantu expansion.
Journal Article
Reconstructing West-Coastal Bantu Vocabulary as Evidence for Early Banana Cultivation in Central Africa
Lexical data has been key in attempts to reconstruct the early history of the banana (Musa spp.) in Africa. Previous language-based approaches to the introduction and dispersal of this staple crop of Asian origin in humid sub-Saharan Africa have suffered from the absence of well-established genealogical classifications and inadequate historicallinguistic analysis. To overcome these hurdles, we focus in this article on West-Coastal Bantu (WCB), one specific branch within the Bantu family whose genealogy and diachronic phonology are well established. We reconstruct three distinct banana terms to Proto-West-Coastal Bantu (PWCB), i.e. ·di-ykcmdô/·mä-ykôndô 'plantain', ·di-ykô/·mä-ykô 'plantain' and ·ki-túká/·bi-túká 'bunch of bananas'. From this new historical-linguistic evidence we infer that AAB Plantains, one of Africa's two major cultivar subgroups, already played a key role in the subsistence economy of the first Bantu speakers who assumedly migrated south of the rainforest around 2500 years ago. Furthermore, we analyze four innovations that emerged after WCB started to spread from its interior homeland in the Kasai-Kamtsha region of present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) towards the Atlantic coast, i.e. di-konde 'plantain', ki-tébe 'starchy banana', banga 'False Horn plantain', and di-toto 'sweet banana'. Finally, we assess the historical implications of these lexical retentions and innovations both within and beyond WCB and sketch some perspectives for future lexicon-based research on the history of the banana.
Journal Article