Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of phonetic symbols
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I The main language groupings
- 1 South Africa: a sociolinguistic overview
- 2 The Khoesan Languages
- 3 The Bantu languages: sociohistorical perspectives
- 4 Afrikaans: considering origins
- 5 South African English
- 6 South African Sign Language: one language or many?
- 7 German speakers in South Africa
- 8 Language change, survival, decline: Indian languages in South Africa
- Part II Language contact
- Part III Language planning, policy and education
- Index
- References
3 - The Bantu languages: sociohistorical perspectives
from Part I - The main language groupings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of phonetic symbols
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I The main language groupings
- 1 South Africa: a sociolinguistic overview
- 2 The Khoesan Languages
- 3 The Bantu languages: sociohistorical perspectives
- 4 Afrikaans: considering origins
- 5 South African English
- 6 South African Sign Language: one language or many?
- 7 German speakers in South Africa
- 8 Language change, survival, decline: Indian languages in South Africa
- Part II Language contact
- Part III Language planning, policy and education
- Index
- References
Summary
INTRODUCTION
The present domain of the Bantu languages extends in an eastward progression from the Cameroon–Nigerian borderlands through the equatorial zone to the Kenyan coast and then southwards to the Cape. The geographic expanse is thus enormous, occupying fully one-third of the African continent, as is the degree of linguistic diversity. On account of the well-known problem of distinguishing languages and dialects, a precise count of the Bantu languages is not possible; their number is conservatively reckoned at about four hundred. Some 250 million people speak one or more of the Bantu languages as mother tongues today.
This chapter considers the linguistic sociohistory of southern Africa, with particular attention to the Bantu languages. The term ‘Bantu’ (Bâ-ntu) was coined by W. H. I. Bleek in 1857 or 1858 (Silverstein 1993 [1968]), and popularised through his Comparative Grammar (1862). Bleek noticed certain recurrent patterns among widely distributed languages on the African continent, and he happened upon the composite term Bâ-ntu to name these languages and their speakers. The prefix ba-, the so-called class 2 prefix, is the plural marker for many noun stems with human referents in these languages. The stem *-ntu names representatives of the given class; hence Bantu is conveniently translated as ‘people/persons’. (Cf. Zulu abantu; Northern Sotho batho; Tsonga vanhu; Venda vhathu, etc.) Bleek's coinage follows the frequent onomastic tradition where a group self-identifies itself as ‘(true/real) people’, reserving ethnonyms for outsiders.
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- Information
- Language in South Africa , pp. 50 - 78Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
References
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