Tracing routes through roots: unraveling the Bantu migration through linguistics and archaeology

Abstract

Humans have been moving across the globe for thousands of years, often following food and other resources. As they migrate, they leave behind traces of their history, including linguistic, archaeological, and botanical evidence. One of the largest migrations in African history was the Bantu migration of Bantu-speaking peoples moving from Central West Africa to the eastern part of the continent. Despite its large scale, the fine details of this migration– specifically the timing and exact paths of the migrants– remains up for debate (Koile et al. 2022). I chose to study the Bantu Expansion because of its fascinating history and the link between two of my majors, anthropology and linguistics. Despite all the studies conducted in history, genetics, archeology and linguistics, there are still many unknowns about the early migration routes in Central Africa. The aim of this paper is to examine the findings made by archeologists and linguists working on lexicostatistics to classify languages in order to understand the mismatches within and between these disciplines.. This paper aims to summarize the main hypotheses according to leading linguists and archaeologists, and to discuss their merits and what future research could be done to come closer to the truth of this mass migration, which began around 5,000 years ago. The Bantu people are characterized by their language group of the same name which is a significant subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family that consists of 1,500 languages in Sub-Saharan Africa. The term “Bantu” was coined by the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek as a reconstruction of the Proto-Bantu term for ‘human’. In modern times, the Bantu subgroup encompasses over 500 languages spoken by approximately 240 million people across a vast area of 9 million square kilometers. The origin of these languages is widely believed to be situated near the border of Nigeria and Cameroon at approximately 4,940 BP (Koile et al. 2022). The early Bantu people were semi-sedentary agriculturalists occupying primarily savannah habitats and moved at a rate of approximately 1.2 km/yr (Clist 1989). At the migration’s completion, most Bantu people were sedentary as a result of widespread iron industry and today, represent hundreds of distinct cultural groups. Being such a large group within the Niger-Congo phylum with a great deal of internal diversity, there has been some argument over the decades about what a language requires to be considered Bantu. The seminal work in Bantu classification was done by Malcom Guthrie, who defined Bantu as a system of noun classes marked by prefixes– similar to gender in non-Bantu languages– organized into singular-plural pairs; and as having a common lexicon with cognates, words that share the same direct descent from a parent language. Guthrie created a system of dividing the Bantu area into 15 geographic zones with letters associated, and each zone was divided into smaller linguistic groups by decades (ie. A10, A20, etc), and each individual language within the larger group was given its own number (i.e. E53 to designate the language Mwĩmbĩ). His approach has since been updated and rearranged, as grouping languages geographically tends to give a false sense of relatedness between them. It is more reliable to group languages based on common ancestors, and the field of historical linguistics focuses in part on building phylogenetic trees for languages based on cognates and sound changes between closely related-languages, and this work is being done on Bantu languages.--Introduction.