The Bantu expansion

Assembled from 14 blocks · 2 evidence · 3 related

1. Story
2. The spread of the Bantu languages from a homeland in the Nigeria–Cameroon borderland across central, eastern and southern Africa, and the largest single linguistic dispersal on the African continent. It is usually placed as beginning in the third millennium BCE and continuing over some three thousand years, reaching southern Africa within the first millennium CE. The homeland is identified by the same diversity argument used for Austronesian: the deepest divisions within the Bantu group, and the position of its nearest relatives within the wider Niger-Congo family, both lie in West Africa, while the several hundred languages spread over the rest of the subcontinent are comparatively shallowly differentiated. The mechanism is argued rather than settled — the association with iron-working and with the spread of particular crops is long-standing, but the relative weight of demographic movement, technological advantage and language shift among existing populations remains open, and whether the expansion proceeded as a single front or as separate western and eastern streams is actively debated. It is the reason a traveller can cross a continent and find related languages the whole way.
3. Knowledge
4. Niger-Congo
5. The Bantu expansion
6. Connections
7. Niger-Congo
8. The Bantu expansion begins in the Nigeria–Cameroon borderland
9. The Bantu expansion
10. Greenberg reduces Africa to four families
11. The Bantu expansion begins in the Nigeria–Cameroon borderland
12. Evidence
13. Supports the four-family classification of African languages, including the establishment of Niger-Congo and Afroasiatic as currently understood, by multilateral comparison. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The present standing of each of the four groupings is characterised from working knowledge of the subsequent literature, not from any survey retrieved in this session.
14. Supports the description of a conservative, bibliography-linked classification policy that treats isolates as top-level families, and thereby the point that published family counts differ by policy. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. glottolog.org returned EGRESS_BLOCKED in this session, so no version, family count or language count is quoted anywhere in this pack, and the editorial and institutional attribution is given from standing knowledge.