LANGUAGES 889 



they possessed any form of speech before their forests were invaded by Negro 

 races of a higher type. Possibly, however, they did use a language of their 

 own, and here and there traces of the original language may perhaps be met 

 with in peculiar words or defective pronunciation which they introduce 

 when speaking the tongues of tribes which now surround them. Anywhere 

 near the Uganda Protectorate the forest Pygmies speak dialects which 

 are related to one or other of the two following stocks : Mbaba, which, 

 together with its allied language, Momfii^ is of unclassified affinities; 

 and Kibira, which is a very debased Bantu language. The Dwarfs in 

 their pronunciation frequently replace consonants by a kind of faucal 

 gasp which is something like the Arabic " 'Ain." This is expressed in my 

 vocabularies by ;. 



The mystery of the Ba^tu languages still remains unsolved as regards the 

 parentage and the place of origin of this most remarkable of African 

 language groups. I may claim, I think, to have pushed our investigations 

 a little further, though perhaps the result of my researches leaves me, as 

 a student of the Bantu languages, rather more puzzled than I was a few 

 years ago, and less sure of my original theories. At the risk of wearying such 

 of my readers as have been over the ground before, I will once more briefly 

 review the principal points of this Bantu question, with the excuse that 

 whereas most other African language groups are only of interest to the 

 philologist, the question of the Bantu languages is one with which even 

 statesmen may become concerned. 



North of a line which starts on the west coast of Afi-ica at the 

 Anglo-German frontier between the Cameroons and Old Calabar, and which 

 line then follows more or less roughly the fifth degree of north latitude, 

 the course of the Mubangi-Welle, the northern limits of the Congo Forest, 

 and a course drawn from the north end of Lake Albert Nyanza in a south- 

 easterly direction to the coast of the Indian Ocean — north of this line 

 the separate and independent language families in the northern two-thirds 

 of the African continent must number more than a hundred — a hundred 

 groups at least — each so separate from the other and without outside 

 affinities that any one of them might be Asiatic or American so far as 

 special African affinities were concerned.* South of the line which has 

 been defined in the foregoing sentence, instead of there being more than 

 a hundred languages families there are only two — the Bantu and the 



* Only perhaps in one or two features in ])honology is there any widespread 

 African " gloss ' over these groups, which have not a feature in vocabulary or 

 grammar in common. The " kp," "gb " guttural-labial is certainly a peculiar African 

 characteristic found in no other tongues outside that continent, and this guttural lahial 

 extends right across Western and Central Africa from the White Nile to the Gambia, 

 and from the Cameroons to Ruwenzori. 



