The Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages

This volume brings together leading scholars from Africa, Europe, the Americas and beyond to provide a detailed account of the languages of the Bantu family, which cover an area from Cameroon and Kenya in the north to South Africa in the south. The Bantu family is part of the Niger-Congo phylum and one of the world’s biggest language groups, comprising around 500 languages. The family includes major languages with large numbers of speakers, such as Zulu, Kinyarwanda, and Swahili, the most widely spoken and taught African language, as well as many community languages and several endangered languages. Bantu languages feature prominently in the complex and multilingual language ecologies that are characteristic of the linguistic situation in much of Africa and they provide rich evidence for the study of theoretical and comparative linguistics, language contact, and language change. They play an important role in education, commerce, culture, and artistic expression, in the media and public discourse, in governance and social justice, and are central to the future of the continent and the well-being of its communities.

The first part of The Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages provides background and context, with chapters exploring the history of research in the field; language and prehistory in Bantu-speaking Africa; and typology and variation. Chapters in the second part offer broad comparative overviews of Bantu phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, socio- and applied linguistics, before Parts III - VII cover more specific topics in Bantu linguistics across a variety of subfields, ranging from structural issues such as the augment and melodic tone to historical and sociolinguistic topics such as Bantu languages in the diaspora and language policy and standardization. The chapters in the final part offer individual structural overviews of a range of languages from across the Bantu-speaking area. The book will be an essential resource for students and researchers specializing in the Bantu languages and for typologists and comparative linguists more broadly.

Lutz Marten, Professor of General and African Linguistics, SOAS University of London, Ellen Hurst-Harosh, Research Associate, University of Johannesburg, Nancy C. Kula, Professor of Linguistics, Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, Jochen Zeller, Professor, Linguistics, University of KwaZulu- Natal

Lutz Marten is Professor of General and African Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He is interested in linguistic theory, comparative and historical linguistics, and questions of language, identity, and society. Most of his work focuses on African languages and he has conducted research in Eastern and Southern Africa.

Ellen Hurst-Harosh holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on African youth language practices, including stylects and registers, and the use of African languages and English in peer interactions and online spaces, media, texts, and education. She is a Research Associate with the Department of Languages, Cultural Studies, and Applied Linguistics at the University of Johannesburg.

Nancy C. Kula is Professor of African Linguistics at the University of Leiden (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics). Her research focuses on Bantu languages of Central/Eastern and Southern Africa where she works on phonology, mophology, intonation, tone, the phonology-syntax interact, and aspects of morphosyntax. She also works on language policy, multlingualism, and multilingual pedagogies and practices in Africa.

Jochen Zeller is Professor of Linguistics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. He received his PhD from the University of Frankfurt in 1999, and has lived and worked in South Africa since 2001. He specializes in generative syntax, but he has also published on semantics and phonetics and on topics in socio- and applied linguistics. While his main research area is Bantu grammar, he is also interested in language and cognition more broadly, and he has been working on various projects that use experimental methods to explore online language processing in speakers of Bantu languages.