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27.01.2022
Linguistic traces of migrations in Gabon
Colloquium by Prof. John Nerbonne
Time: 27th January, 13:00
Speaker: Prof. John Nerbonne
Title: Linguistic traces of migrations in Gabon
Abstract:
Gabon is an African country located very close to the homeland of Bantu languages (Cameroun). Starting about 5,000 years ago, Bantu-speaking populations diffused into almost all of sub-Saharan Africa. By examining two independently-collected lexical datasets recording the pronunciation of 88 and 158 words in more than 50 linguistic varieties spoken in Gabon, using a variant of Levenshtein distance, we obtain a numerical classification of the major linguistic groups. We compare this classification to available ones based on historical linguistics methods (cognate-sharing defined by experts), and find them overlapping, which indicates that the two methods capture the same signal of linguistic difference (and relatedness). To focus on the historical relatedness between major linguistic clusters, we control for the linguistic similarity related to contact (proportional to geographic vicinity) and suggest that the first Bantu-speaking groups to people Gabon were those speaking KOTA-KELE (B20) languages. The other varieties concern five different immigration waves (B10; B30; B40; B50-B60-B70 – Guthrie nomenclature) that penetrated Gabon later in history. To conclude, we suggest a scenario of settlement that incorporates available paleoclimatic, archeological and population genetic evidence.
If you are interested in joining the Colloquium, please send a mail to monika.doll@ifu.uni-tuebingen.de.
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