Bantu

A. There are about 500 Bantu languages. The best known is Swahili. They are spoken south of the Sahara in Africa. They are generally quite similar to one another, varying about as much as the Romance languages do.

B. Like Taiwan with Austronesian, Cameroon and eastern Nigeria are the exception with Bantu. Here, the languages differ much more from one another. This suggests that the family emerged here, and archaeology shows that the Bantu people began migrating southward from this area around 3000 B.C. This means that most of the languages are so close because they are mostly rather new.

C. There is another clue that Bantu is a new group. In southwestern Africa, there is an area where click languages—called Khoi-San languages by linguists—are spoken rather than Bantu ones.

Two click languages are also spoken up in Tanzania. The question is why this group is situated amidst Bantu speakers. It would appear that Khoi-San was once much more widespread and that Bantu speakers overran most of these languages and left behind only small islands. In Bantu-speaking areas, fossil skulls have been found of the Bushman type. Some Bantu languages spoken near Khoi-San ones have some clicks.

D. Thus, the distribution of language families today is quite different from the original one. Basque is a similar case, surrounded by Indo-European languages. The Basques have some distinct genetic markers from other Europeans, and this and other evidence shows that Basque is a remnant of a larger group once spoken across Europe. Indo-European speakers migrated into Europe and largely replaced these earlier languages; Basque is a lone living clue to that past.