in rural tanzania, recent major influences happen between kiswahili and english to ethnic languages rather than ethnic languages, which had been in contact for so long, influencing each other. in this work, i report the results of investigation of lexical changes in indigenous languages that aimed at examining how ethnic communities and their languages, namely cushitic iraqw, nilotic datooga, n...

Cushitic Maarten Mous 1. Geographical distribution and speakers The Cushitic family consists of more than thirty languages spoken in Northeastern and Eastern Africa. Ethnologue (Gordon 2005) mentions forty-seven languages because it distinguishes six Oromo languages and six Somali languages. do not include the mixed language Ma'a/Mbugu in this overview. This is a language classified as (South) ...

Previous research has shown that listeners from tonal languages are better at processing tone compared to speakers from non-tonal languages. However, most of this research has tested Asian tone languages, particularly those which have many tonal contrasts and a dense tone-to-syllable association. In this paper we investigate the mental representation of derived tones in Bemba, a Bantu language ...

Locative inversion (LI) is a construction that is very prominent in Bantu languages. It involves inversion of a locative with the logical ⁄ thematic subject. The inversion is accompanied by a reversal of grammatical functions whereby the locative becomes the subject. LI is associated with a special discourse function, that of presentational focus. Within Bantu there is quite some variation, esp...

The expansion of Bantu-speaking agropastoralist populations had a great impact on the genetic, linguistic, and cultural variation of sub-Saharan Africa. It is generally accepted that Bantu languages originated in an area around the present border between Cameroon and Nigeria approximately 5,000 years ago, from where they spread South and East becoming the largest African linguistic branch. The ...

The Lemba are a traditionally endogamous group speaking a variety of Bantu languages who live in a number of locations in southern Africa. They claim descent from Jews who came to Africa from "Sena." "Sena" is variously identified by them as Sanaa in Yemen, Judea, Egypt, or Ethiopia. A previous study using Y-chromosome markers suggested both a Bantu and a Semitic contribution to the Lemba gene ...

Majority of Bantu languages encode subjects by head-marking and objects by positional licensing. This reflects a point in the historical process whereby positional licensing of objects becomes obligatory due to the loss of inflecctional morphology. What we observe in synchronic grammar is considerable variation both across and within languages in the use of head-marking morphology for objects. ...

The expansion of Bantu languages, which started around 5,000 years before present in west/central Africa and spread all throughout sub-Saharan Africa, may represent one of the major and most rapid demographic movements in the history of the human species. Although the genetic footprints of this expansion have been unmasked through the analyses of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA linea...

Abstract This paper investigates the sociolinguistic factors that impact typology and evolution of grammatical gender systems in northwestern Bantu, most diverse area Bantu-speaking world. We base our analyses on a typological classification 179 Bantu languages, focusing various instances semantic agreement their role erosion marking. In addition, we conduct in-depth sociolinguistics population...