Bantoid and Bantu in Cameroon: An Historical Re-Assessment

While Cameroon is widely known as the cradle of the Bantu Expansion, where Bantu populations separated from other Bantoid groups some 5,000 years ago to migrate and spread across the southern half of Africa, Cameroon itself is not well known linguistically. Books on Bantu languages gave less space to the northwestern languages, and research on Bantoid languages has always been sparse. This started to change three or four decades ago, and is gathering steam. The edited volume focuses on the Bantu and Bantoid languages of southern Cameroon. The particular area where Bantu and Bantoid languages have interacted and remain in contact is known to be linguistically extremely heterogenous. The languages spoken near the Proto-Bantu nucleus display some unique linguistic features that could be either inherited or acquired by contacts with neighbouring languages. To investigate these issues, the chapters concentrate on three themes designed to better understand the intricate relationships observed between Bantu and Bantoid languages spoken in Cameroon: new approaches to language classification using non-lexical data, the study of verb morphology and other verb features, and the evolution of tense systems and marking.

The book provides new insights, new data, and new analyses on the history of Bantoid and Bantu speaking-populations and contact between them, on verb structure in Bantoid, Proto-Bantu and Bantu languages and on the genesis of tense in pre-Proto-Bantu.