Publications

In this article, we offer a historical account of the development of two phonemic U+2018interiorU+2019 vowels, [U+0259] and [U+0264], and heterosyllabic vowel sequences in Ngwi, avirtually undescribed West-Coastal Bantu language spoken in the western part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While interior vowels phonologized due to the loss of their conditioning environment, most heterosyllabic vowel sequences come from the fission of an ...

The Congo Basin rainforest is among the least wellU+2011documented linguistic regions of the world. This means that our current knowledge of Central African languages is biased by important research gaps. This is particularly true of phonetics, as soundU+2011specific explorations and data collection in the area remain a marginal activity within language documentation. This paper offers new phonetic evidence for the presence of labialU+2011velar ...

This paper presents the noun class system of Bwala, a nearly undocumented and undescribed Bantu language of the Teke group spoken in the Kinshasa Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Genealogically speaking, Bwala belongs to the Kasai-Ngounie (Extended) subclade, one of the major monophyletic groups within West-Coastal Bantu. Bwala has seven singular classes (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 15) and five plural classes (2, 4, 6, 8, 10) which form ...

Lexical data has been key in attempts to reconstruct the early history of the banana (Musa sp.) in Africa. Previous language-based approaches to the introduction and dispersal of this staple crop of Asian origin have suffered from the absence of well-established genealogical classifications and inadequate historical-linguistic analysis. We therefore focus in this article on West-Coastal Bantu (WCB), one specific branch within the Bantu family ...

In this paper we offer a first systematic account of the noun class system of Ngwi, a West-Coastal Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. First, we describe the synchronic system of noun class prefixes and the agreement patterns they trigger on constituents of the noun phrase and the verb. Second, we provide a diachronic analysis of the innovations the synchronic Ngwi noun class system underwent with respect to the noun ...

In this article, we present a qualitative and quantitative comparative account of Final Vowel Loss (FVL) in the Bantu languages of the Lower Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We argue that this diachronic sound shift rose relatively late in Bantu language history as a contact-induced change and affected adjacent West-Coastal and Central-Western Bantu languages belonging to different phylogenetic clusters. We account for its ...

This book addresses various shortcomings in definitions of U+201CapplicativeU+201D when compared to what is actually found across languages and proposes a four-way distinction among applicative constructions, especially relevant to Bantu, a large family of languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In this article, we assess the genealogical validity of WestU+2011Coastal Bantu (WCB) as a major subclade of the Bantu family by means of the Comparative Method. Based on a comparative dataset of 66 different cognate series, we demonstrate that languages previously classified as WCB according to lexiconU+2011based quantitative methods share at least one common phonological innovation: the phonemic merger of the ProtoU+2011Bantu velar stops *g ...

In this paper we deal with the identification, geography and internal phylogeny of Bantu B50-80 languages. According to lexicostatistical and lexicon-based phylogenetic studies, these languages belong to the West-Coastal branch of the Bantu family along with the Kikongo Language Cluster. First, we present an updated list of nearly 100 language varieties falling into Guthrie's B50-80 groups along with corresponding updated geographical coordinate ...