The Bantu expansion begins in the Nigeria–Cameroon borderland
Speakers of the languages ancestral to the Bantu group begin to spread from the Nigeria–Cameroon borderland into central Africa and thence east and south, a dispersal continuing over roughly three millennia and reaching southern Africa within the first millennium CE. The homeland is identified by the position of the group's deepest divisions and nearest relatives within the wider Niger-Congo family. The start date is a conventional approximation and the mechanism — demographic movement, technological advantage, or language shift among resident populations — remains argued.
Uncertain — sources disagree, or the dating is contested. Stated here, not resolved.
Subjects
- The Bantu expansion · phenomenon · Central, eastern and southern Africa · not located
- Niger-Congo · concept · Sub-Saharan Africa · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
The Languages of Africa
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.
Indiana University, Bloomington · 1963 · Partly verified
Greenberg, J. H., The Languages of Africa (Bloomington, 1963)
Recorded on The Bantu expansion
- The Bantu expansion begins in the Nigeria–Cameroon borderland
- Greenberg reduces Africa to four families
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.