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Language Lineage

Northwest Bantu

Not one branch but several: the languages that stayed closest to the homeland. Many of them have worn down the Proto-Bantu word shape, with shortened stems and reduced prefixes and final vowels.

c. 3000 BCE – presentSouthern Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the northern Republic of the Congo
On this page
  1. Near the Homeland
  2. Writing and Colonial Rule
  3. Where it's spoken
  4. Turning points
  5. Contested classifications

01

Near the Homeland

The Bantu languages of the northwest, in Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon (Guthrie's zones A and B), are the ones that moved least from the Proto-Bantu homeland. Phylogenetic studies do not find a single ancestor for them: they are several early offshoots, each branching off before the ancestors of the rest moved on. 'Northwest Bantu' is therefore a geographical label, drawn here as one limb for legibility.

In one respect many of them are the least typical Bantu languages. Their words have been worn down: stems reduced to a single syllable, final vowels dropped, noun-class prefixes shortened or merged. This is the opposite of what one might expect of the languages nearest the homeland.

02

Writing and Colonial Rule

Duala, the language of the port of Douala, was among the first Bantu languages of the region to be written. The English Baptist missionary Alfred Saker published a Duala New Testament in the 1860s. Cameroon passed from German to French and British rule, and French and English became the languages of state. Fang, spread across three countries, and Ewondo are regional lingua francas.

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. Cameroon
  2. Equatorial Guinea
  3. Gabon
  4. Republic of the Congo

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Splitc. 3000 – 1000 BCEContested

    The first offshoots

    Groups settling in the forests of southern Cameroon and Gabon separate one by one from the Bantu that continues to spread. Their order is disputed, which is why no single Northwest Bantu ancestor is reconstructed.

    Sources (1)
    • Grollemund, Rebecca, et al. 2015. Bantu expansion shows that habitat alters the route and pace of human dispersals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(43).
  2. Sound lawUndated; probably 1st millennium BCE onwardContested

    Erosion of the word

    CVCV → CVC(V); final V and parts of prefixes → ∅

    In many Northwest Bantu languages final vowels are lost and stems shrink to one syllable, while noun-class prefixes shorten or merge. The changes differ from language to language and cannot be dated closely.

    Compare with other loss across families →

    Sources (1)
    • Van de Velde, Mark, Koen Bostoen, Derek Nurse & Gérard Philippson, eds. 2019. The Bantu Languages, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
  3. Writing1840s – 1860s

    Duala in print

    Baptist missionaries at Douala write Duala in the Latin alphabet and publish scripture in it. For a time it is the main written African language of coastal Cameroon.

    Sources (1)
    • Van de Velde, Mark, Koen Bostoen, Derek Nurse & Gérard Philippson, eds. 2019. The Bantu Languages, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

Outside the tree

Contested classifications

These disagreements may never be settled. Each position is given with its grounds, and no side is declared correct.

  • Largely rejected

    Northwest Bantu as a single branch

    the Bantu languages of Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon share one ancestor

    Evidence for

    The languages are neighbours, share many areal features such as reduced word shapes, and are often grouped together in surveys for convenience.

    Evidence against

    Lexicostatistical and phylogenetic studies consistently find them to be a series of early, separate splits from the Bantu trunk, not a single subgroup. The features they share are largely retentions from Proto-Bantu or the result of contact between neighbours.

    Sources (1)
    • Grollemund, Rebecca, et al. 2015. Bantu expansion shows that habitat alters the route and pace of human dispersals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(43).