LANGUAGES 
481 
the country to the south of their first area of development, and rapidly spread 
over all the southern half of Africa except the extreme south-western corner 
(Cape Colony and Namakwaland). The antecedent populations they absorbed 
or exterminated. 
Henceforth, with the exception of the Hottentot-Bushman, there has been 
but one linguistic family over this huge area of Africa which lies to the south 
of a line cutting the West Coast of Africa between the Cameroons and the 
Cross River, skirting the northern limits of the Congo Basin, traversing the 
Albert Nyanza, passing round to the north of Bu-nyoro, Bu-ganda, and Bu-soga, 
reaching the Victoria Nyanza at its north-eastern extremity, leaving out its east 
coast, striking eastwards again from its south-easternmost gulf, and eventually 
attaining the Indian Ocean at Lamu, following a very irregular course, and 
including Mount Kilimanjaro within its limits, but leaving several detached 
islands of Bantu-speaking areas as enclaves in the Masai and Galla countries 
to the north-east. 
The lines of dispersal of the Bantu negroes appear to have been something 
like the routes given in the accompanying diagram. 
Of course the original home of the Bantu is now occupied by other 
tribes of negroes, not Bantu though, perhaps, speaking languages distantly 
akin to the original Bantu mother-tongue. Probably the original cause 
of the Bantu dispersal was the driving away of the tribe from their first 
home by alien invaders. Checked for a time by the dense Congo forests 
on the south, the movement of the Bantu was at first in an easterly 
direction. Then reaching the Albert Nyanza the main body took a south¬ 
ward direction, and persisted in this while sending off important branches 
to the west and east. 
To some extent the most archaic Bantu tongues existing are still found 
along this main line of route—Ki-rega, Ki-guha, Ki-emba, 1 Ci-bisa, Zulu 
(Isi-zulu)—though a primitive type of Bantu may be found stranded here 
and there off the main route—such as Ki-makonde on the east coast, near 
the mouth of the Ruvuma River, the Nkonde dialects of the north end of 
Lake Nyasa, and Oci-herero of Damaraland. 
The following propositions may be laid down to define the peculiar 
features of the Bantu languages :— 
1. They are agglutinative in their construction , their syntax being formed by 
adding prefixes and suffixes to the root, but no infixes (that is to say, no 
syllable incorporated into the root word). 
2. The root is unchanging to all intents and purposes , though its first or 
last letter (vowel or penultimate consonant) may be modified in pro¬ 
nunciation by the preceding letter of the prefix or succeeding letter of 
the suffix. With one exception there is no inflection: that exception 
(scarcely in origin a true one) is in the case of the preterite tense of 
the verb in certain languages where the root changes in its termination 
probably by the absorption of a suffix. 
3. No two consonants come together without an intervening vowel (except 
where one of them is a nasal, a labial, or a semi-vowel ): no consonant 
is doubled (except by the accidental juxtaposition of two m’s or n’s, 
one of which represents an abbreviated particle): no word ever ends 
in a consonant except in rare instances where the termination through 
contraction and the dropping of a vowel becomes a nasal sound. 
1 Probably the most primitive of all, as spoken in South-West Tanganyika. 
3 1 
