uenced by
Zulu dialects (_Tebele_ and _Ronga_).

(42) The well-marked _Bechuana_ language group has very distinct features
of its own. This includes all the Bantu dialects of the Bechuanaland
protectorate west of the Guai river. Bechuana dialects (such as _Ci-venda_,
_Se-suto_, _Se-peli_, _Se-rolon_, _Se-[chi]lapi_, &c.) cover a good deal of
the north and west of the Transvaal, and extend over all the Orange River
Colony and Bechuanaland. _Se-suto_ is the language of Basutoland;
_Se-rolon_, _Se-mangwato_, of the Eastern Kalahri; _Se-kololo_ is the court
language of Barotseland; _Ci-venda_ and _Se-pedi_ or _Peli_ are the
principal dialects of the Transvaal. Group No. 42, in fact, stretches
between the Zambezi on the north and the Orange river on the south, and
extends westward (except for Hottentot and Bushmen interruptions) to the
domain of the _Oci-herero_.

(43) The _Ronga_ (_Tonga_) languages of Portuguese South-East Africa
(Gazaland, Lower Limpopo valley, and patches of the North Transvaal
(_Shi-gwamba_), Delagoa Bay) are almost equally related to the _Nyanja_
group (41) on the one hand, and to _Zulu_ on the other, probably
representing a mingling of the two influences, of which the latter
predominates.

(44) Lastly comes the _Zulu-Kaffir_ group, occupying parts of Rhodesia, the
eastern portion of the Transvaal, Swaziland, Natal and the eastern half of
Cape Colony. In vocabulary, and to some degree in phonetics, the Zulu
language (divided at most into three dialects) is related in some phonetic
features to No. 42, and of course to No. 43; otherwise it stands very much
alone in its developments. It may have distant relations in groups Nos. 29
and 32. Dialects of Zulu (_Tebele_ and _Ki-ngoni_ or _Ci-nongi_) are spoken
at the present day in South-West Rhodesia and in Western Nyasaland and on
the plateaus north-east of Lake Nyasa, carried thither by the Zulu raiders
of the early 19th century.

The foregoing is only an attempt to classify the known forms of Bantu
speech and to give their approximate geographical limits. The writer is
well aware that here and there exist small patches of languages spoken by
two or three villages which, though emphatically Bantu, possess isolated
characters making them not easily included within any of the
above-mentioned groups; but too detailed a reference to these languages
would be wearisome and perhaps puzzling. Broadly speaking, the domain of
Bantu speech seems to be divided into