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The Bantu expansion [3] [4] [5] was a major series of migrations of the original Proto-Bantu-speaking group, [6] [7] which spread from an original nucleus around West-Central Africa. In the process, the Proto-Bantu-speaking settlers displaced, eliminated or absorbed pre-existing hunter-gatherer and pastoralist groups that they encountered.
In linguistics, the word Bantu, for the language families and its speakers, is an artificial term based on the reconstructed Proto-Bantu term for "people" or "humans". It was first introduced into modern academia (as Bâ-ntu) by Wilhelm Bleek in 1857 or 1858 and popularised in his Comparative Grammar of 1862. [7]
Northwest Bantu is more divergent internally than Central Bantu, and perhaps less conservative due to contact with non-Bantu Niger–Congo languages; Central Bantu is likely the innovative line cladistically. Northwest Bantu is not a coherent family, but even for Central Bantu the evidence is lexical, with little evidence that it is a ...
The approximate locations of the sixteen Guthrie Bantu zones, including the addition of a zone J Following is a list of Bantu languages as interpreted by Harald Hammarström , and following the Guthrie classification .
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.
The term "Bantoid" was first used by Krause in 1895 for languages that showed resemblances in vocabulary to Bantu. Joseph Greenberg , in his 1963 The Languages of Africa , defined Bantoid as the group to which Bantu belongs together with its closest relatives; this is the sense in which the term is still used today.
Prehistoric West Africans may have diverged into distinct ancestral groups of modern West Africans and Bantu-speaking peoples in Cameroon, and, subsequently, around 5000 BP, the Bantu-speaking peoples migrated into other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., Central African Republic, African Great Lakes, South Africa). [5]
Balondo are often also misunderstood as Bantu, Oroko, Balondoba-Nanga, and Balondoba-Diko. Wilhelm Bleek, a German linguist, used the term Bâ-ntu or Bantu, meaning people or humans, to classify and group people with linguistic and cultural similarities in his 1862 publication of A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages. [4]