The dominant language at Court and in trade to-day is an almost artificially-manufactured tongue which had come into existence during the last fifty years—Si-kololo. This will be found illustrated in its most modern form in the first volume of my Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages (Oxford, 1919). My information has been mainly derived from the Sikololo Grammar and Vocabulary published in London by Dr. Stanley Colyer in 1917, and from a Sikololo Phrase-book produced two years’ earlier by Mr. Stirke, the author of this book, in conjunction with a very noteworthy colleague, Mr. A. W. Thomas, formerly master of the Barotse National School.
Sikololo which has gradually displaced and superceded the Sechuana or Sesuto language of the original Bechwana invaders of a hundred years ago, is a far easier language to speak and pronounce than the difficult and highly peculiar idiom of Central South Africa. To philologists, Sechuana and its later southern specialization, Sesuto, are intensely interesting. Sechuana entered South Africa at as ancient a date as any other Bantu tongue—say sixteen or seventeen hundred years ago, coming thither from South-East Africa. But since then it has become highly specialized. The most specialized form of it was the southernmost, Sesuto, scarcely distinguishable a hundred or more years ago from the Sepedi of the Western Transvaal.
The chief Sebituane, born some hundred and twenty years ago, was a Mosuto, the son of a great crazy woman-chief known as Mantatisi. He carried his Sesuto tongue with him on the amazing journey he made with half his tribe across Bechuanaland to Lake Ngami and the Zambezi. Sechuana or Sesuto was the Court language in Barotseland when Livingstone first reached the Upper Zambezi in 1851. As the years rolled by, and after the Makololo (Basuto) dynasty had given place to a restoration of the Aluyi chieftainship, the original Sesuto spoken by Sebituane and well understood by Livingstone (who could converse in it freely) became greatly changed. It has remained the governing language of Barotseland and has succeeded almost in replacing and killing the remarkable Siluyi of the old rulers; and neither of the beautiful languages of the Tonga-Subia group of Southern and South-Eastern Barotseland has been allowed to take its place.
In Sikololo the pronunciation is much simplified. The rough guttural combination kx—of Sechuana-Sesuto gives way to the simple k; a hiatus formed by a dropped consonant is filled by h; ts is generally changed to z; e in the prefixes becomes i; f which had become h in Sesuto is generally replaced; the uncouth tl, tlh or the aspirated th and kh return to the simple t and k; and in general the pronunciation of Sikololo is brought into conformity with the harmonious phonology of the Zambezi languages.
A far more interesting tongue is Siluyi, the nearly extinct language of the Aluyi; in its older form, that is to say, as it was spoken round about Lialui (the original governing centre, near the left bank of the Zambezi, in about 15° 15´). Here it was a stately language, using preprefixes, and possessing all the seventeen customary prefixes of the Bantu languages. The second (Ba-) and eighth (Bi-) of these were in an abbreviated form, because the Luyi tongue had rather a dislike to an initial b, though it turned the sixteenth prefix—Pa- into Ba-, following a practice which recurs a good deal in the Angola tongues.
The principal form in which I have presented this language in the First Volume of my Comparative Study is derived from the studies of Luyi (Siluyi) compiled some twenty to twenty-five years ago by the Rev. E. Jacottet, of the French Protestant Mission. It was soon evident, when the British South Africa Co. officials got to work, that there was at least one separate dialect of Luyi spoken to the East and North-East of the main Zambezi. This was the Si-kwango or Si-kwangwa, a tongue in which the preprefixes are dropped. Si-kwangwa seems still to be a living speech among the people in the East-Central part of Barotseland; but the much nobler Luyi of the Zambezi vicinity is dying out, even among the natives of Luyi stock, dying out in favour of mongrel Sikololo.
Allied to Siluyi apparently, is the Nyengo language of the Bampukushu people, a scattered tribe living still (perhaps) in the South-Western portion of Barotseland, on the banks of the Kwando or Linyanti river. There has been no record of this speech since that which was compiled by Livingston about 1853, and which I have reproduced (numbered 82) in my Comparative Study of the Bantu Languages.
Still farther south, in the northern part of the basin of Lake Ngami, there were, down to quite recently, the Ba-yeye or Makoba people, whose language also seemed to show kinship with Luyi as well as with the Subia-Tonga group. The imperfect record of this is numbered 81 in my book. It may be extinct as a spoken tongue by now. But its existence where it last lingered on the northern side of Lake Ngami would seem to show that this basin of the shrinking lake (which received a vast but diminishing tribute of water from the Okavango river, and earlier still from the present “Upper Zambezi”) was colonized by the Bantu from the north before it was found and peopled by the Bechuana tribes from the south-east.
So much does Sikwangwa differ from Siluyi nowadays, that it is almost a separate language. If this be so, the Western Zambezi group of my formation would contain at least four languages, Yeye, Nyengo, Luyi and Sikwangwa. I am also informed that Sikwangwa is not the only existing dialect of Luyi, but that two others exist, and are spoken to the North-West and North-East of Lialui and the Zambezi: Si-koma and Si-kwandi. These have only been recorded in name, and I have seen no specimens of their vocabularies. It would be interesting to ascertain whether, like Luyi, they retain the use of preprefixes; or whether they have dropped them, as have most of the languages in the western half of the Zambezi basin.
There is a tendency in Siluyi for b and p to take the place of v or f as the initial of the root, although in the prefixes b and p are inclined to drop out: so that Aba- becomes Aa-; Ibi-, I; Ubu-, Uu-; and Apa-, Aba-. Thus we have -pumo for “belly,” instead of the familiar -fumo; -bumu for “chief,” in place of -fumu; -pumbu for “ground” (ordinarily -vu) -buu for “hippopotamus” (-vubu), -bula for “rain” (-vula); and -pi for “war” (-vita). The roots for the numerals “six,” “seven,” “eight” and “nine” were in Livingstone’s day, very peculiar and unlike those of any other Bantu tongue; though to-day they are supplemented by paraphrases meaning “five-and-one,” “five-and-two,” etc.