Clicks, tones and the Bantu journey
The languages of Africa
Africa has more than two thousand languages, nearly a third of the world’s. It has the most varied sounds on Earth, and a migration that remade half a continent.
Chapter 1
A third of all languages
Glottolog records 2,269 languages in Africa. In the 1960s Joseph Greenberg sorted them into four great families; today only Afro-Asiatic and the core of his Niger-Congo (Atlantic-Congo) are widely accepted, while “Nilo-Saharan” and “Khoisan” are seen as collections of independent families and isolates.
Chapter 2
The Bantu journey
Some three to four thousand years ago, Bantu-speaking people began moving out from the borderlands of present-day Cameroon and Nigeria, east and south, until they covered much of the continent. The resemblances among today’s roughly five hundred Bantu languages — Swahili, Zulu, Shona, Lingala… — are the footprints of that journey.
Chapter 3
Noun classes
Bantu languages have no masculine or feminine — instead they sort nouns into a dozen or more classes, each with its own prefix, and the other words in a sentence agree with it. In Swahili a person is mtu and people watu; a book is kitabu and books vitabu.
| Swahili | |
|---|---|
| person | m-tu |
| people | wa-tu |
| book | ki-tabu |
| books | vi-tabu |
Chapter 4
Clicks
In southern Africa some languages use clicks — the sounds of the tongue snapping off the roof of the mouth — as ordinary consonants. Khoekhoe, ǃXóõ and their neighbours (once lumped together as “Khoisan”) have dozens of them; so do Hadza and Sandawe in Tanzania, both isolates. Zulu and Xhosa borrowed their clicks from these neighbours after Bantu speakers moved south.
Chapter 5
Drums that talk
Most African languages are tonal. Yoruba distinguishes high, mid and low tones, and the same string of syllables on a different melody is a different word. That is why Yoruba “talking drums” can imitate the rise and fall of a sentence and beat out speech that listeners understand.