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Linguistic Diversity and its Sources

Themes and actions

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Editor : Nina DOBRUSHINA, Brigitte PAKENDORF, Maïa PONSONNET

Bantu diachronic phonology


  Contact person
Gerard PHILIPPSON

Scientific framework and objectives

The earlier part of my long-standing research on Bantu languages dealt mainly with the reconstruction and classification of East African Bantu (Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Eastern RDC and Moçambique). During the last few years, I embarked upon a more comprehensive project, namely the reconstruction of the diachronic phonology of the whole domain. No doubt this is a tall order, and I concentrate at this stage on the northwesternmost part of the Bantu area, covering the languages of "zone A" spoken in Cameroon. As these are geographically adjacent to "Wide Bantu" languages, i.e; so-called Grassfields and other Bantoid languages, I take the latter into consideration as well. Having no first-hand field experience in the area, I rely on available sources which are generally plentiful and of quite good quality, thanks among others to SIL and Yaoundé University. Some partial results are already available, inter alia for Bobe (A31 according to Guthrie-Maho coding), the Mbam languages (A44-462 and A60 minus A63) and the "Bafia" group (A50). I have submitted a contribution (to appear) on so-called "consonantal double reflexes" first mentioned by Malcolm Guthrie, in the course of which I discovered that a tonal conditioning of the Proto-Bantu voiced coronal stop which had been noticed as a very idiosyncratic phenomenon in Basaa (A43) by Teil-Dautrey is in fact present in several of the languages considered, Narrow Bantu as well as Grassfields. At the same time, I am engaged with Rebecca Grollemund of the University of Missouri at Columbus, in a phylogenetic classification of northwestern Bantu languages, using phonological criteria.


  Publications
  • Grollemund, R., Philippson, G., 2019, "A tentative new phylogenetic classification of zone A languages, based on consonant correspondences", 50th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, Workshop "Languages of Cameroon", Vancouver, Canada, 22-25/05/2019
  • Philippson, G., 2018, "Where exactly does Bobe (A31) fit in the Bantu genealogy?", 48th Colloquium on African Languages & Linguistics, Leiden (P.-B.), 08/30 to 09/01/18
  • Philippson, G., 2022, "Double reflexes in northwestern Bantu and their implications for the Proto-Bantu consonant system", in On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar, 4/1, Bostoen, K., de Schryver, G.M., Guérois, R., Pacchiarotti, S. (eds), Berlin, Language Science Press, pp. 3-58, Niger-Congo comparative studies

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