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Language Dispersal Beyond Farming
Edited by Martine Robbeets and Alexander Savelyev
[Not in series 215] 2017
► pp. 235–258

Chapter 10
Were the first Bantu speakers south of the rainforest farmers?

A first assessment of the linguistic evidence

| UGent Centre for Bantu Studies (BantUGent)
| UGent Centre for Bantu Studies (BantUGent)

Popular belief has it that the Bantu Expansion was a farming/language dispersal. However, there is neither conclusive archaeological nor linguistic evidence to substantiate this hypothesis, especially not for the initial spread in West-Central Africa. In this chapter we consider lexical reconstructions for both domesticated and wild plants in Proto-West-Coastal Bantu associated with the first Bantu speech communities south of the rainforest about 2500 years ago. The possibility to reconstruct terms for five different crops, i.e. pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum), okra (Hibiscus/Abelmoschus esculentus), cowpea (Vigna unguiculata), Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea) and plantain (Musa spp.), indicates that by that time Bantu speakers did know how to cultivate plants. At the same time, they still strongly depended on the plant resources that could be collected in their natural environment, as is evidenced by a preliminary assessment of reconstructible names for wild plants. Agriculture in Central Africa was indeed “a slow revolution”, as the late Jan Vansina once proposed, and certainly not the principal motor behind the early Bantu Expansion.

Keywords: Bantu Expansion, West-Coastal Bantu, agriculture, foraging, hunter-gatherers, lexical reconstruction, plant names
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Reviewing the evidence for the Bantu Expansion as a language/farming dispersal
  • 3.Crop vocabulary in Proto-West-Coastal Bantu
  • 4.Wild plant vocabulary in Proto-West-Coastal Bantu
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 21 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.215.10bos
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