As the outcome of fieldwork done as part of the BantuFirst project, Guy Kouarata, Sara Pacchiarotti and Koen Bostoen have a new French paper out on the geography, inventory and description of the Teke languages in DRC and Congo. It includes new lexical data collected during survey missions in “Teke-speaking” areas from April 8 to June 15, 2021 and from June 29 to August 15, 2022. These surveys aimed at a better mapping of the geographical distribution of Teke varieties, especially in the DRC. The new lexical data, one list containing 650 lexical correspondences in 11 Teke varieties that are little or not at all described (https://osf.io/​gn6ka), and another of about 370 correspondences in 12 other varieties (https://osf.io/​vdfxt) are available in open access on the Open Science Framework. The article has just been published in the journal Linguistique et langues africaines: https://journals.openedition.org/lla/12921.

Op 7 februari 2024 rapporteert het Nederlandstalig Belgisch tijdschrift Knack in zijn rubriek “Planeet Draulans” over de recente Nature paper met betrekking tot de verspreiding van de Bantoetalen waaraan het BantuFirst-project (BantUGent) bijdroeg.

Het Nederlandstalig populariserend wetenschappelijk tijdschrift EOS Wetenschap rapporteert online over BantUGent-onderzoek met betrekking tot de verspreiding van de Bantoetalen.

De taal kruipt waar ze niet gaan kan, toont de verspreiding van Bantoe in Afrika

In a new interdisciplinary study published in Nature, an international group of scientists confirms that the spread of the Bantu language family, which started in West Africa about 5,000 years ago, was mainly driven by human migration. Migrating Bantu speakers spread their languages and new ways of life throughout central, eastern and southern Africa. In the process, they established intensive contacts with populations speaking other languages who already lived in those regions, such as hunter-gatherers in the Congo rainforest and the Kalahari Desert. Most contemporary Bantu speakers have distant ancestors originating from West Africa, while a minority are descended from local populations. The expansion of Bantu languages and their speakers dramatically transformed the linguistic, cultural and biological landscape of Africa.

This new study is based primarily on modern genetic data from 1763 individuals, including 1526 Bantu speakers from 147 different language communities in 14 different African countries, as well as ancient genetic data (aDNA) from 12 individuals from the Late Iron Age. More than one-third of the new data comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), previously underrepresented in evolutionary genetic studies. Together with their Congolese partners, the Ghent research teams of Prof. Koen Bostoen (BantuFirst, Department of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy) and Prof. Joris Delanghe (Department of Diagnostic Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences) collected modern genetic data. These genetic data were analyzed at the University of Uppsala (Sweden) under the direction of Prof. Carina Schlebusch.

The full study can be consulted at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06770-6

press release Nature Bantu UGent

communiqué de presse Nature Bantu UGent

persbericht Nature Bantu UGent

Pieter De Coene‘s historical PhD research project titled Kubandwa in the southwestern Great Lakes, 15th century – 1930s. A case-study in the historical dynamics of public healing under the co-supervision of Gillian Mathys, Felicitas Becker, Jean-Marie Nduwayo (Burundi University), and Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) is now co-hosted by BantUGent. Welcome, Pieter!

Edward Ntonda (Université Paris-Nanterre) and Aron Zahran (INALCO Paris) join the BantUGent research group as joint PhD students. The two of them conduct research on the Chikunda language as part of the ANR-funded Orikunda project led by Rozenn Guérois (LLACAN Villejuif & BantUGent associate). At UGent, their their doctoral project will be co-supervised by Koen Bostoen and Maud Devos. More information can be found here. Welcome to Aron & Edward.

FWO has awarded Nina van der Vlugt (°1998) a PhD fellowship for fundamental research  for her doctoral project titled “Divergence and convergence in the Shona languages: contact, migration, and change in a subgroup of Southern African Bantu“, which she will carry out at BantUGent under the co-supervision of Koen Bostoen and Hilde Gunnink. Nina has BA and MA degree in Linguistics from Leiden University. Welcome, Nina! A short summary of her planned PhD research can be found below.

The Shona languages of Southern Africa form a large, closely-related and relatively well-studied group of Bantu languages. Despite a wealth of synchronic data on these language varieties, the history of Shona languages and their speakers is not well-understood. I will test a new proposal that would revolutionize the understanding of Shona’s linguistic history by recognizing what has been referred to as a ‘spread-over-spread’ event, bringing into question its position within Southern Bantu. Even though lexicon-based classifications strongly support a close relationship between Shona and Southern Bantu, many common Southern Bantu phonological and morphological innovations are not shared with Shona. Earlier studies suggest that Shona might be more closely related to Bantu languages of Malawi. Further, initial evidence suggests that successive layers of language contact in Shona correspond to large-scale contact events: the Great Zimbabwe empire, the Indian Ocean trade network, and European colonialism. In this study, I investigate this ‘spread-over-spread’ scenario in three ways: by initiating the reconstruction of Proto-Shona, by establishing the position of Shona languages within the Bantu family via lexicon-based phylogenetics, and by untangling successive phases of language contact in Shona. This research adds to the understanding of the genesis and evolution of Shona languages and their position in Bantu, as well as the early history of Zimbabwe and Southern Africa.

The European Research Council (ERC) awarded 400 young researchers with a prestigious Starting Grant, including five researchers at Ghent University. One of them is Sara Pacchiarotti from our BantUGent research group to do the groundbreaking research proposed in her CONGUBANGI project whose summary is below.

The Congo-Ubangi watershed in the northern margins of the Congo rainforest is home to a complex mosaic of genealogically and structurally diverse languages spoken by small-size communities with different material cultures and subsistence specializations. Straddling the borders of three modern countries in Central Africa, i.e., Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville, and the Central African Republic, it is a major hotbed of linguistic, cultural, and genetic diversity with a deep history of human occupation. Despite the myriad of insights it could generate about language evolution and deep human past, it is poorly known due to difficulty of access and an astonishingly intricate configuration. CONGUBANGI will realize a breakthrough in our understanding of how linguistic diversity correlates with cultural and genetic diversity and why it originated and persisted in this specific ecoregion for millennia through an interdisciplinary approach involving linguistics, archaeology, and genetics. Understanding the genesis of a central area in the continent where mankind originated represents a unique opportunity to learn about our shared human history of evolution, migration, and diversification, and their impact on human language, a faculty unique among all forms of animal communication. Beyond research, CONGUBANGI will replicate world-wide efforts to preserve local linguistic diversity in a region where it is threatened to extinction by multiple uniformizing pressures, so that it can be made permanently available for posterity.

Along with several colleagues from the UGent ΔiaLing research group, BantUGent was present with three talks at the jubilee 26th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 50 years after the first ICHL conference, which was held from 4 to 8 September 2023 at the University of Heidelberg.

The first one was part of the workshop “Interactions at the dawn of history: Methods and results in prehistoric contact linguistics” organized by Rasmus G. Bjørn (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena) and Marwan Kilani (University of Basel – Swiss National Science Foundation), the second part of a general session on “Reconstruction and periodization”.

1. “Pre-Bantu substrate in Batwa Bantu languages of the Congo rainforest: A comparative study of nasal-oral stop cluster reduction” by Koen Bostoen, Jean-Pierre Donzo, Guy Kouarata, Lorenzo Maselli, & Sara Pacchiarotti;

2. “Uncovering lost paths in the Congo rainforest: A new, comprehensive phylogeny of West-Coastal and Central-Western Bantu” by Sara Pacchiarotti, Natalia Chousou-Polydouri, Jean-Pierre Donzo, Guy Kouarata, Lorenzo Maselli & Koen Bostoen;

3. “An evolutionary loner in Southern African Bantu: The classification of Yeyi” by Hilde Gunnink, Natalia Chousou-Polydouri & Koen Bostoen.

Due to a technical issue causing delay in generating of phylogeny of West-Coastal and Central-Western Bantu, the second talk was eventually replaced last minute by the following talk:

4. “Word-final reduction of Proto-Bantu *ng as a diagnostic feature for successive divergence and convergence in West-Coastal Bantu” by Sara Pacchiarotti, Guy Kouarata & Koen Bostoen.