The languages spoken in British Central Africa belong to the great Bantu family, which, as is now known, occupies (with a few exceptions) the whole continent of Africa south of a line drawn from the Gulf of Cameroons to the mouth of the Tana River on the east coast. Those spoken within the Protectorate are Nyanja, Yao, the Lomwe dialect of Makua, Tonga, Tumbuka, Nkonde, and a Zulu dialect spoken by the Angoni clans. In Northern Rhodesia we may mention Bisa, Bemba, Luba, and Lunda as the principal languages.
All the Bantu languages are as closely related together as English, Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian dialects. There are several points about them which are extremely interesting to the comparative philologist. They have no grammatical gender—the same pronoun is used for a man and a woman; and, accordingly, most natives who learn English come to grief on this point, like Winwood Reade’s interpreter who asked: ‘What you say when him son be girl?’ On the other hand, nouns are divided into eight or ten classes, each with its own plural inflection, and adjectives and pronouns agreeing with it as they agree with each of the three genders in Latin. This agreement extends also to the verbs.
The Bantu languages further differ from those with which most of us are familiar, in that their inflections are indicated, not by suffixes, but by prefixes—a fact which first meets us in the various and perplexing forms assumed by the names of tribes and countries. Thus Myao is ‘a Yao’ (man or woman), Wayao is ‘Yaos,’ and Chiyao the Yao language. Each noun-class has its own prefix (sometimes much atrophied or even dropped altogether) for singular and for plural, and though these prefixes vary greatly in the different languages, they are always recognisable as having come from the same original, just as we know that the English oak, the German Eiche, the Dutch eik, and the Danish eeg are all derived from one primitive form. The inflectional prefixes of adjectives and verbs are derived from the noun-prefixes, though not always identical with them in form; and the pronouns are modifications of the prefix. In fact, broadly speaking, the prefix may be called a pronoun, and the group of languages under consideration are sometimes called the prefix-pronominal languages.
The careful reader may think that a somewhat Hibernian assertion has been made above—viz. that the prefix is recognisable even where it has been dropped; but this is in fact the case: the pronoun, which must be inserted before the verb, always shows what the lost prefix of the noun has been. Thus we have in Nyanja the word njoka, ‘a snake’; it has no prefix as it stands, but when used in a sentence we find it takes the pronoun i: njoka i luma, ‘the snake bites.’ Now in Zulu, which has kept its prefixes better than Nyanja, we find that ‘snake’ is inyoka.
This principle of agreement, by which all the words governed by the noun repeat its prefix in some form or another at their beginning, is called the alliterative concord, and may be illustrated by the following sentences:—
Nyanja
| Mtengo | watu | u-li | wotari, | u-dza-gwa. |
| Tree | our | it is | high | it will fall. |
The pronoun for the class to which mtengo (anciently umtengo) belongs is u, which is quite clearly seen before the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to fall.’ In the possessive pronoun and the adjective, it is a little disguised, because it becomes w before another vowel (watu = u + atu).
The plural of this is:
Mitengo yatu i-ri yetari, i-dza gwa.