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id	eprints-38832
recordtype	eprints
institution	SOAS, University of London
collection	SOAS Research Online
language	English
language_search	English
description	The Bantu family is the largest African language family in terms of geographic and demographic spread: the 450–500 Bantu languages are spoken in 27 countries, by about 240 million speakers. The close linguistic relation between Bantu languages has been recognized since the nineteenth century and was the focus of the earliest comparative linguistic studies in Africa, leading to the establishment of a reconstructed proto-language. Following the work of Bleek, Meinhof, and Guthrie, contemporary work on the internal classification of Bantu languages employs computational and phylogenetic methods, insights from comparative work on smaller subgroups, as well as models of language contact. A particular concern of comparative Bantu has for a long time been the relation between classification and social history, and hypotheses about the spread of Bantu languages across central, eastern, and southern Africa have had considerable influence on models of African history.
author_additional	Vossen, Rainer
author_additionalStr	Vossen, Rainer
format	Book Chapters
author	Marten, Lutz
author_facet	Marten, Lutz
authorStr	Marten, Lutz
author_letter	Marten, Lutz
title	Bantu and Bantoid
publisher	Oxford University Press
publishDate	2020
url	https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/38832/