LANGUAGES OF TLIF KILIMA-NJABO DISTRICT. 483 
extraordinary rapidity, and noting at the same time 
how great is the uniformity in grammar, construction, 
and vocabulary between all the Bantu languages, we 
can hardly believe that they are a very ancient offshoot 
of the negro race, or that the date of their original 
dispersion from their centre of development is very 
far removed. I should think, as far as we may judge, 
that it is about 2000 to 2500 vears since the Bantu 
fj 
people commenced their invasion of Southern Africa; 
and that before this date—before the dispersal of 
what was evidently a compact and homogeneous tribe 
—one common language, the Bantu mother-speech, 3 
was spoken. One of the principal reasons which 
induces me to hazard this guess as to the recent period 
at which this family of languages split up into separate 
branches and spread out over half the continent of 
Africa, is the interesting fact that in nearly every 
form of Bantu speech the domestic fowl is indicated 
by words of one type, all pointing to a common origin. 
This in its most archaic form is nguku . This is the 
term used in Ki-nyoro, 4 in Lu-ganda (the language of 
Buganda, on the north-west shore of the Victoria 
Nyanza), in the tongues of the Upper Congo, of Lake 
Tanganyika, of Kilima-njaro, at the present day, while 
variants of the same word are found in Kafir (ihkuku ), 
Zulu, Mpongwe, and, in short, almost all the known 
members of the Bantu group. Now this leads us to 
believe that the domestic fowl must have been known 
to the original Bantu race before it commenced its 
migrations from the centre of its development, from 
3 Itself, no doubt, in those early days but a sister-tongue or a 
lateral branch of many cognate forms of prefix-governed speech de¬ 
scended from an earlier stock. 
4 Ki-nyoro, one of the most northerly forms of Bantu language, is 
spoken in Bu-nyoro on the Victoria Kile, in lat. 2° K. 
i i 2 
