890 LANGUAGES 



Bushman-Hottentot* For all practical purposes, at the present day in 

 the southern third of Africa there is but one language family, the only 

 rival to the Bantu being the Bushman-Hottentot tongues, which, together 

 with the allied Sandawi in East Africa, are spoken at most by 50,000 

 people at the present day, as against an approximate 40,000,000 who 

 £peak Bantu languages. From the Cameroons on the west to Zanzibar 

 on the east, from the southern frontiers of Somaliland on the north to 

 Damaraland and Cape Colony on the south, 40,000,000 — or it may even 

 be 50,000,000 — of black men speak languages belonging to the Bantu 

 group, languages which are far more closely inter-related than is the case 

 in any other grouping of African forms of speech. The Bantu languages, 

 in fact, are rather more closely related one to the other — even in their 

 extremest forms — than are the Aryan languages. This is so much the 

 case that a native of Zanzibar can very soon make himself understood on 

 the Congo, while a man of the Cameroons would not be long before he 

 grasped the vocabulary of the Zulu. This interesting fact must play a 

 certain part in the political development of Africa south of the fifth degree 

 of north latitude. The rapidity with which the Kiswahili tongue of 

 Zanzibar — a very convenient, simple, and expressive form of Bantu speech — 

 has spread far and wide over East Central Africa, and has even gained a 

 footing on the Congo, hints at the possibility of the Bantu Negroes at some 

 future time adopting a universal Bantu language for inter-communication. 

 Unless before then English, French, and Portuguese languages have got 

 such a firm hold on the Bantu populations in the English, German, French, 

 Belgian, and Portuguese spheres of influnce, the generalised type of Bantu 

 language which will grow up amongst the 40,000,000 of Bantu Negroes 

 may lead to a community of thought and belief and to a political league 

 against the white man. Missionaries — English, French, and German — are 

 still loth to teach the people among whom they dwell a European 

 language. This reluctance on their part is undoubtedly based on a dread 

 that by initiating the people into a means of communication with the 

 European world they will emancipate them too quickly from pastoral 

 control. But all the time that they delay to take this step Kiswahili 

 spreads, and the Bantu Negro, impelled by the inevitable course of events 

 to interest himself in regions beyond his tribal district, will, if he cannot 

 associate himself rapidly with European interests, begin to think and talk 

 of a Bantu nationality. 



Most people who even know the word "Bantu" are aware that the 

 leading feature of this group of languages is the employment of pronominal 



* This is true for all practical purposes, but in the eastern part of the Bantu 

 language field there is an incursion of the Nilotic families, which brings the Masai 

 and Nandi groups down as far south as the sixth degree of south latitude. 



