There is disagreement about the routes taken by populations speaking Bantu languages as they expanded to cover much of sub-Saharan Africa. Here, we build phylogenetic trees of Bantu languages and map them onto geographical space in order to assess the likely pathway of expansion and test between dispersal scenarios. The results clearly support a scenario in which groups first moved south throug...

The expansion of Bantu languages represents one of the most momentous events in the history of Africa. While it is well accepted that Bantu languages spread from their homeland (Cameroon/Nigeria) approximately 5000 years ago (ya), there is no consensus about the timing and geographical routes underlying this expansion. Two main models of Bantu expansion have been suggested: The 'early-split' mo...

This article describes the design of an electronic knowledge base, namely a morpho-syntactic database structured as an ontology of linguistic categories, containing linguistic units of two related languages of the South African Bantu group: Northern Sotho and Zulu. These languages differ significantly in their surface orthographies, but are very similar on the lexical and sub-lexical levels. It...

Morphological parsers are typically developed for languages without contrastive tonal systems. Ha, a typical Bantu language of Western Tanzania, proposes a challenge to these parses with both lexical and grammatical pitch-accent that would, in order to describe the tonal phenomena, seem to require an approach with a separate level for the tones. However, since the Two-Level Morphology (Koskenni...

This paper describes the implementation of Finite State methods, fsm2 in particular, in automatic analysis of Bantu nouns in one of the under resourced languages, Runyakitara. This is the first effort towards computational analysis of Runyakitara. A detailed description of Runyakitara noun classes and how they were analysed using fsm2 is given. In the current state of developing the system, 80%...

The objective of this article is to create awareness amongst speech-language pathologists and audiologists in South Africa regarding the difference between the sound systems of Germanic languages and the sound systems of South African Bantu languages. A brief overview of the sound systems of two Bantu languages, namely isiZulu and Setswana, is provided. These two languages are representative of...

Read online: Scan this QR code with your smart phone or mobile device to read online. The objective of this article is to create awareness amongst speech-language pathologists and audiologists in South Africa regarding the difference between the sound systems of Germanic languages and the sound systems of South African Bantu languages. A brief overview of the sound systems of two Bantu language...

In many languages the agreement relation between an argument and a verb is suppressed or altered when the argument is extracted. These so-called anti-agreement effects (AAEs) have been discussed for Berber, Breton, Irish, Turkish, Italian dialects, and other languages as well (see Ouhalla 1993, among others). Recently, Scheider-Zioga (2000, 2002, 2007) and Cheng (2006) have discussed AAE in Ban...