ABSTRACT
This second edition of The Bantu Languages consists of two parts. Part 1 contains general chapters that provide an overview of the state of the art in the study of the sound systems and morphosyntactic structures of the Bantu languages and of their classification, reconstruction and different contact situations. Part 2 contains short grammatical analyses of individual Bantu languages for which no book-size grammar is available. Together, these chapters provide a thorough introduction to the grammatical structures of the Bantu languages and to the historical evolutions that have shaped them. The focus on language structure and history means that this volume does not aim at giving an exhaustive overview of contemporary Bantu studies. Such an overview would have to include work on documentation, orthography creation, lexicography, youth languages and so on. This edition is very similar in structure and approach to the highly influential first edition (Nurse & Philippson 2003a), but its contents are almost entirely new. Some chapters from Part 1 have been thoroughly revised. Bonny Sands has renewed the chapter on the Sounds of the Bantu Languages (Chapter 3) in consultation with Ian Maddieson, the author of this chapter in the first edition. Larry Hyman has updated his chapter on Segmental Phonology (Chapter 4). David Odden and Michael Marlo have revised the chapter on Tone (Chapter 5), originally written by Charles Kisseberth and David Odden. The chapter on Derivation was renamed Word Formation (Chapter 6) after an update by Koen Bostoen in close collaboration with its primary author, Thilo C. Schadeberg. The chapter on Aspect and Tense has been revised by its first author Derek Nurse and complemented with a section on mood/modality by Maud Devos to become a new chapter on Aspect, Tense and Mood (Chapter 7). The six other chapters of Part 1 are entirely new. For Part 2, we chose to invite chapters on a new set of languages, because sketch grammars are both extremely useful and relatively hard to get published. For some of the languages included in Part 2, such as Chimpoto N14 (Chapter 23) and Pagibete C401 (Chapter 15), hardly any other published information is available, while others, such as Ngazidja G44a (Chapter 20), have a rich literature but no reference publication that provides a coherent overview of the basic grammatical features of the language. The sketch grammars of the first edition are available on the companian website of this second edition. They have not been revised for this second edition.
