ABSTRACT

This chapter aims at presenting the various methods employed for classifying Bantu languages, paying particular attention to Guthrie’s classification, then to lexicostatistical works and briefly other more specific approaches, like Möhlig’s and Ehret’s, and finally moving to more recent phylogenetic methods using Bayesian inference, network representations, etc. It tries to give a balanced and objective account of the principles and results achieved by the studies under examination and presents them in a compact format.