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Bantoid languages
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In the classification of African languages, Bantoid is a branch of the Benue-Congo subfamily of the Niger-Congo phylum. The term 'Bantoid' was first used by Krause in 1895 for languages that showed resemblances in vocabulary to Bantu. Greenberg in his influential 1963 The Languages of Africa defined Bantoid as the group to which (Narrow) Bantu belongs together with its closest relatives; this is the sense in which the term is still used today.
A proposal that divided Bantoid into
North and
South Bantoid was introduced in Williamson (1989, based on work presented in Blench [1987]). In this proposal, the Mambiloid and Dakoid languages are grouped together as North Bantoid, while everything else Bantoid is subsumed under South Bantoid; the
Ethnologue uses this classification. The uniformity of the North Bantoid group was called into question subsequently, but the work did establish Southern Bantoid as a valid genetic unit. Southern Bantoid is home to the well known and numerous
Bantu subfamily.
References
- Blench, Roger [1987] 'A new classification of Bantoid languages.' Unpublished paper presented at 17th Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics, Leiden.
- Williamson, Kay (1989) 'Niger-Congo Overview'. In: The Niger-Congo languages, ed. by John Bendor-Samuel, 3–45. University Press of America.
- Williamson, Kay & Blench, Roger (2000) 'Niger-Congo', in Heine, Bernd and Nurse, Derek (eds) African Languages - An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University press, pp. 11—42.
