four great sections:--(a) the
languages of the Great Lakes and the East Coast down to and including the
Zambezi basin; (b) the South-Central group (_Bechuana-Zulu_); (c) the
languages of the South-West, from the southern part of the Belgian Congo to
Damaraland and the Angola-Congo coast; and (d) the Western group, including
all the Central and Northern Congo and Cameroon languages, and probably
also group No. 2 of the Albert Nyanza and Semliki river.

_Common Features_.--There is no mistaking a Bantu language, which perhaps
is what renders the study of this group so interesting and encouraging. The
homogeneity of this family is so striking, as compared with the
inexplicable confusion of tongues which reigns in Africa north of the Bantu
borderland, that the close relationships of these dialects have perhaps
been a little exaggerated by earlier writers.

The phonology of the Western group (d) is akin to that of the Negro
languages of Western and West-Central Africa. A small portion of (b) the
South-Central group (_Zulu_) has picked up clicks, perhaps borrowed from
the Hottentots and Bushmen. Otherwise, the three groups (a), (b) and (c)
are closely related in phonology, and never, except here and there on the
borders of the Western group, adopt the peculiar West African combinations
of _kp_ and _gb_, which are so characteristic of African speech between the
Upper Nile and the Guinea coast.

The following propositions may be laid down to define the special or
peculiar features of the Bantu languages:--

(1) They are agglutinative in their construction, the syntax being formed
by adding prefixes principally and also suffixes to the root, but no
infixes (that is to say, no mutable syllable incorporated into the middle
of the root-word).[7] (2) The root excepting its terminal vowel is
practically unchanging, though its first or penultimate vowel or consonant
may be modified in pronunciation by the preceding prefix, or the last vowel
in the same way by the succeeding suffix.

(3) The vowels of the Bantu languages are always of the Italian type, and
no true Bantu language includes obscure sounds like _oe_ and _ue_. Each
word must end in a vowel (though in some modern dialects in Eastern
Equatorial, West and South Africa the terminal vowel may be elided in rapid
pronunciation, or be dropped, or absorbed in the terminal consonant,
generally a nasal). No two consonants can come together without an
intervening vowel, except in