ABSTRACT
One conclusion immediately imposes itself when one considers the totality of the languages spoken in the vast region covered by the equatorial forest. The forest is not an area of linguistic homogeneity: quite the contrary, it is an area of contacts and borders. Although it is imaginable that all the peoples of the forest have a rather analogous way of life, the study of the linguistic divisions rather points to the fact that the forest is an environment that is difficult to access, where communication is essentially established via the waterways and where the absence of regular contacts maintains the existing borders between different linguistic groups. Thus, the forest is the place where the Bantu languages border on the Ubangian languages to the west and on the Central Sudanic languages to the east. It is also the place where one finds the dividing lines which the classification shows between, on the one hand, the Bantu languages of the eastern and the western block; and, on the other hand, between the Bantu languages of the northwest (zone AB10, B20, B30) and the rest of the western languages. All types of borders can thus be found in this biotope: borders between different genetic families, borders between different groups of the same family and borders between the major subgroups that are distinguished within the group of Bantu languages itself.
