Fascinating how Bantu went from being a small language group, similar in size to all the other Niger-Congo languages, to encompassing almost the whole of sub-Saharan Africa in just a few centuries. Very nice video! 👍
Before the Bantu migrants in Central Africa, the Pygmys inhabited it, and Greek historians mentioned the existence of the Pygmies in North Central Africa and Chad which indicates the occurrence of extermination or displacement of them
@@ikengaspirit3063 not really, though. PIE and proto-finno-ugric have shared vocabulary related to trade, suggesting that the groups (that both exist today) coexisted and interacted.
@@ts-wo6pp But the fact that PIE is relatibely younger than most language families but has no relatives implies PIE absorbed them during the IndoEuropean expansion
Mande languages followed by kordofanian and Ijoid are the oldest African languages and closest to the original ancient Saharan language. These groups are also the origins of the E1b1a paternal haplogroup that most subsaharan Africans come from. The genetics matches the linguistic and migration pattern in your video. Good work 👍
No what you say is not true. Actually mande groups lost all nouns classes and develop tone. Mande, ijoid, Dogon are so different to other Niger Congo languages that it means they diverged so earlier from the Nigercongo tree. And since they all have the same ancestor, none is oldest than other.
I'll start with an example, the english language developed 5th-7th century AD from a germanic parent language. Just because English and German have the same root does not mean one is not older than the other. Its like saying two kids have the same parents so one can't be older than the other. That's nonsensical. As the earliest branch of the Niger Congo this makes Mande, iJoid and Dogon the to be the older in its spoken form than other branches. @@lodewijkvandoornik3844
@@lodewijkvandoornik3844 he’s saying they are the older siblings and that’s genetic fact they are some of the oldest group in the region groups diverged and create new groups
Amazing video, as always. The sources I assume were used in the research may be slightly dated, as, these days, Kordofanian is generally no longer classified as Niger-Congo by linguistic circles. There are other smaller ongoing disputes over the family classification too.
There are indeed ongoing disputes over language classification with respect to Niger-Congo, but Kordofanian is still generally classified as Niger-Congo, just not a distinct branch of Niger-Congo.
Amazing map, it's incredible to know that african languages exists since that very long period of time compared to language families from other continents
not that they existed earlier, but that they could be tracked earlier. In part I guess its because most sub-groupings of the initial lineage were all successful instead of one later lineage destroying all the rest.
I had always been curious about this one because I couldn't grasp how most of Sub-Saharan Africa had languages which belonged to the one family. The answer is they could simply trace them all the way back to 12,000 years ago. Far earlier than the beginnings of other major language families.
@@uniformityofnature1488 The linguists basically state how old a language family is by considering how much cognate words differ over time. I hope this helps.
@@stanleydouge2803 not true, sorry. Older than the khoi-san? Sure. Older than the bantu? I don't think so. It is possible to clarify the age of a linguistic family with scientific accurancy: while there are possibly older language families in Africa, it is not the case for the whole continet...
Please next do the Khoisan languages (Khoe-Kwadi is probably related to Sandawe), the Altaic languages, the Afro-Asiatic, the Austroasiatic, the Dene-Yeniseian, Basque-Iberian (or ancient Iberia, in general), Sino-Tibetan, Eskimo-Aleut, Uto-Aztecan, and Australian languages.
I wonder what languages were being spoken in the rest of West Africa (eg. most of the Guinea Coast) prior to the Niger-Congo languages spreading all across the area as well as what ethnic groups existed in those areas at that time.
@@TitanTribble no, basal West africans are those who brought Niger Congo languages from the green Sahara, they mixed with West African hunter gatherers
Great video, I really like your language family ones. It's interesting to watch the map slowly morph over time. What programs do you use to make these? I assume you use one program to make individual slides then animate them with another program.
Nice video, a lot of hardwork i can see. But i think you should've made separate videos on Niger and congo languages since you made separate videos on Indo Iranian and Indo Aryan languages.
Note that Niger-Congo is not a demonstrated family, as not all genetic links have been established and there is big question marks as to if these groups are even related. Not saying this video is bad, but until further research is done, Atlantic-Congo is currently the largest PROVEN family in Africa. Still a great video!
For those who know, why is it that linguists can look at this group of languages, which are often pretty poorly attested or at least have very short and recent recorded histories, and find this relationship from around 10,000BC? On the contrary, with Indo-European they can only go as far back as around 4,000BC and cannot reliably link it to any other language family, despite the fact that multiple IE branches have very good attestation, which also goes back to very early times. (e.g. Greek, Hittite, Latin, Sanskrit, Avestan)
There is a lot of speculation going on in comparative linguistics many proposed language families are purely hypothetical and have no reconstructed Proto-language. Proposed "Macrofamilies" usually lack evidence and the more you go back in time, the likelier it becomes that superficially similar language families do not actually share common descent, but gained their similarities from a Sprachbund. Indo-European is among the most well attester language families and has the largest number of reconstructed lemmas for a language family ancestor. Niger-Congo on the other hand is still speculative since the connection to Mandé hasn't been fully established yet. That's why some researchers just talk about Volta-Congo or something different
Adamawa-Ubangi missed the opportunity to take over East and Southern Africa before the Bantus arrived. All the other language groups were locked up in West Africa and had nowhere to expand to.
Until a certain (not well defined) age, the Sahara and the Gabon-Congo rainforest must have been two formidable barriers. For instance: the taming of camels is thought to have happened in the second half of the II millennium BC. Without camels, travelling through the Sahara must have been really hard (though the Sahara was probably more narrow than now). Moreover, in an age in which the population was not numerous and the Sahel and Sudanic savannas were more fertile than now, the West-African Sudanic strip must have been felt as sufficient for human life for many centuries, so that there was not an urge to emigration. Maybe Bantu migrations began when the population had increased and the quest for new lands and new resources had begun to be felt stronger than the obstacle of the rainforest.
It's a lie. We were in the green Sahara prior to 5000 BC. And archaeological evidence proves the ancestors of modern Khoi & San groups were as far north as upper Egypt. There is no evidence of Bantu and modern west Africans existence in west Africa prior to 4000-3000 years ago. Only the small stature hunter gather are adapted to the dense forests prior to West Africans clearing the forests for agriculture and pastoralism. The 2020 study in Shum Laka Cameroon proves as much.
Please do Mande languages. We speak two of them that happen to be mutually unintelligible (Bambara and Soninké) and it frustrates the hell out of me why they're classified as being from the same family
It is a fact that African language families are generally reviewed after each new thesis and their study continues. At the moment, these languages are grouped
@@aayushagarwal4138 no. Most still speak their language in addition to European language. Some languages are in danger of extinction but not because of European languages but other languages in the same family or other families. E.g many groups in northern Nigeria speak their language in addition to Hausa, an Afro Asiatic language of the chadic family. Many people speak it as a second language but some still as a first leaving their language at risk of extinction.
No, i think this is just reflecting the use of languages as an 'official' language for government etc, to solve the problem that there are so many African languages! South Africa has 12 official languages and 35 languages in total. Indeed the problem going to deep Moçambique etc, it finding someone who does speak a European language!
Yeah most likely but I heard that Khoisan isn't even one language family but multiple that got grouped together because they all have all those clicking sounds.
A majority of these languages are still spoken all that changed is people either learn English or French becasue every country in Africa has like 20 different languages spoken in them
No it’s not really,it’s agreed by most scholars,but some of the branches are still in dispute whether they are in the same language family,Atlantic Congo is 100% confirmed to be a single language family
The problem with this entire video is that Niger-Congo is not a proven language phylum as required by the standard historical comparative method. In other words, it is a non-existing language grouping. At best it is a hypothesis. But there is not a single study which does the ground work to establish this as a valid language construct. I dare any reader to fund such a source. The entire grouping is based on selective mass sound comparisons and typological analysis; all which are not used in the comparative method. All of Greenberg's phyla was categorized with this mass-comparative method. Instead of starting from scratch, researchers like Blench, Ehret, Takacs, and others just simply kept it and have for years attempted to put round pegs in square holes. Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afro-Asiatic, and Khoisan, all scientific frauds. These phyla are the Piltdown man of linguistics.
The atlantic congo grouping is proven. The only questions are about the Mande, Ijaw and Kordofan languages but as the first two are genetically linked with other West africans(Bantu included), they share a common ancestor for sure
@@mikailm6934 There is not one single text in existence that has shown that Niger-Congo exist as a result of applying the comparative method. If so, can you please drop the text and author here? Thank you in advance.
@@mikailm6934 None of his source material are texts that demonstrates, using the comparative method, that Niger-Congo exist as a valid construct. It is hard for those outside of the historical linguistic space to understand what I am saying. But language families are established using the comparative method and none of Joseph Greenberg's phyla were established by this method.
Hold up! I read somewhere else that the original African is from Sudan. And i've also noticed that the Senegalese have very similar both physically and culturally to the South Sudanese.
The meaning of the word "Sudan" (from Arabic: "the place of the Black") shrinked to only the two present States who bear that name only through a process which started in the last decades of XIX century and ended in the last 30 years of XX c. --- Before, it meant all the savanna strip going from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. --- In colonial age, for instance, Mali was called "French Sudan (Soudan Français)" until 1959. --- The shrinkage became because it was originated by a misinterpretation of the name of "Anglo-Egyptian Sudan" (which originally meant only "the part of Sudan area which is / was dominated jointly by the Britons and the Egyptians", but after the independence of the region became the name of the new country).
Yes wolof have no similarity with Niger congolese language. It is very close to Dinka/Nuer of south sudan. I dont know what criterion linguistic are based on..wolof dont share anything with fulani diola ( only contact) however classified in the same family.We share a lot of word often with same meaning with dinka and Nuer tribe name family, culture name of person....wolof in this family must be review.. wolof have his own singularity....siwali and all bantu language have nothing in common with wolof... Im wolof from Sénégal 🇸🇳.
@@maramediop9647Wolof is a Niger Congolese language and it has no similarities with Dinka or Nuer. I have South Sudanese friends and every time I play them Wolof music, they seem to always say WTH are they singing about…Wolof sounds a bite different from other Niger Congolese languages because it is not a tonal language like the other languages in the family
Great video, thank you! One thing seemed surprising to me - why do you think the expansion of the Atlantic languages to the more eastern areas (like Nigeria and Cameroon) occured so fast and so late (between 1500 - 1800 AD), when they were for thousands of years limited only to the quite distant west coast? Are there any indications for this, e.g. in the connection with the colonisation? Otherwise, I would expect that expansion to be much more slower and earlier, probably happening the whole time parallelly with the Volta-congo group. Or even earlier, as the Atlantic languages are in minority in the east, so they might be considered remnants after more recent Volta-congo expansion. What do you think about this interpretation?
@@CostasMelas I am not sure I understand. Maybe you answered a different question: "What caused the Bantu (orange) expansion to the south"? But I am asking about the expansion of Atlantic languages (light blue) from the west coast (like Guinea etc.) to the east (e.g. Nigeria) between 1500 and 1800 AD, as shown in your video. I do not see how this would be related with usage of iron metallurgy by Bantus somewhere else and 2000 years ago.
@Jankus to answer your question, the cause for the spread is a specific group of nomadic pastoralists collectively known as the Fula. Fulas speak a language belonging to the Atlantic branch. Fulanis (as they are called in Nigeria) supposedly had been traveling across West Africa since the 14th century while looking for grazing land. Once they became Islamicized however, they invaded Northern Nigeria in a series of jihads between the late 18th and mid 19th centuries. Now they live there.
@@albanian_barcelona_fan Mongolian didn’t even exist back then. Proto-Mongolic (the ancestral language of all Mongolian languages) was spoken around the time of Genghis Khan so not even that long ago. Whatever the Xiongnu spoke, it wasn’t Mongolic, though maybe it was related to it. In my opinion though, it’s likely that the Xiongnu spoke several languages seeing as they weren’t one ethnic group but a confederation of different people.
I'm trying to think what is the most oldest language in history cuz I feel like Proto-Niger-Congo Isa big contender if it existed in the year 9500 BC when civilisation dint even exist and pretty much before agriculture existed
The oldest identifiable phylum is Afro-Asiatic, whose age of common unity I’ve read is about 13,500 years ago. That precedes Niger-Congo by about 2 millennia. Though, every language’s history is as long as any others. It’s just that linguists can sometimes determine when the family to which a language or languages belong is older than another’s. However, bear in mind that there are caveats to consider for Niger-Congo. Mande and Ijoid are two conventional members that show so few diagnostic Niger-Congo traits that their status as independent language families is considerably is easier to entertain. That doesn’t take away from the 9,500 BCE age for Niger-Congo, though.
@@wachuku1 11,500 BC wow and ye ofcourse every languages history goes back tens of thousands of years till we were able to speak about 200,000 years ago I believe
@@ikengaspirit3063 yes but no. Indo europeans were warriors with calvalry who rulled the european farming populations. Bantu were the farmers so they are more like ancient european farmers(anatolian farmers)
@@mikailm6934no indoeuropeans were mostly pillagers and sometimes peacefully mixed with the neolithic farmers,also don’t forget indoeuropeans were a mix of neolithic Anatolian farmers and caucasian hunter gatherers
Bantus had farming and cattle raising/ herding and Iron. Pre Bantus had stone and hunting. Less population than Bantus. Who had more. That being said the Bantus didn't kill everyone. A lot of mixing happened too
I think the majority of the bantus mixed with the pygmies of the equatorial area, the period when they spread till there, so they brought those features to the east & southern Africa. I can't guess something else why the majority of the bantus have different features from their north nigritoid prehistoric ancestors (west & north-central sudanic/sahelian Africa)!!! Somewhere I read that the Africans of the last area I spoke about, are called nigrids (mande, wolof, voltaic, adamawa-ubangi, yoruba, igbo, kru, kwa, etc). So I think we have the nigrids, the semi-bantus (Cameroon) & the bantus in the niger-congo language family!!!
Some Pre-Bantus in East Africa did have agriculture and cattle(the Cattle gotten from Kushitics) but even then they still maintained very low population densities for some reason(well, on the agriculture side, they didn't have the sort of efficient agriculture that allows for fully sedentary living so their agriculture was more there to complement their primarily hunter-gatherer lifestyle).
@@Fallacia_Konstantinos Yeah, we consistently see significant African Hunter Gatherer genes among the Bantu and other Forest African peoples like the Igbo.
Es increíble como se minimiza la expansión batu siendo que esta representa en términos territoriales el de casi toda Europa y sigue vigente, definitivamente se sigue discriminando y restado importancia a África y su historia precolonialista
La gente ni sabe que lugares como Mali alguna vez fueron grandes centros de cultura y comercio que llegaron a ser imperios poderosos, mucho gente en Europa llegó a pensar que en el reino de Mali las calles eran de oto
@@monkeypie8701 bantus are not whites. It was more of a cultural genocide. Also, khoisan mixed with bantus rather than bantus mixing with khoisan. The real khoisan genocide was at the hands of the great white people
I plan to make them a more detailed video for each branch. It is impossible to do it for the whole family because each branch is divided into at least 10-50 languages.
In their was scripts in west Africa Ndsibidi for example used by the ekoid and Igbos and even reaching as far as Cameroon it also gave rise to two new world scripts one in Cuba one in Haiti the Haitian one is called vèvè
It is a dream, just like dreaming about pan-slavism or dreaming that all romance-speaking countries, from Italy to Brasil, from France to Chile, from Romania to Mexico, unite and re-create a new Roman Empire, greater than the previous one... Not feasable.
@@grantottero4980Prussia did it. unified most germanic people made themselves a county for germanic people. Russia did it. france ,Italy ,UK and evan spain United those whom are similar to them. no country in Africa like that exists because we believe it can be done peacefully. it can't people won't step down they must be removed by force. it's possible not all Bantu people but a country with a large part of us.
@@xavierblitz5647 Во многих Африканских странах местные языки вытесняются языками бывших колонизаторов. Например: Ангола. В Анголе почти повсеместно доминирует Португальский язык. Даже между собой, на бытовом уровне ангольцы используют португальский язык, а не язык своих местных этносов.
@@grantottero4980all languages or most are related in some way to each other just some are closer to others,maybe exceptions would be Khoisan or andaman
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Fascinating how Bantu went from being a small language group, similar in size to all the other Niger-Congo languages, to encompassing almost the whole of sub-Saharan Africa in just a few centuries.
Very nice video! 👍
You can thank genocied for that
Before the Bantu migrants in Central Africa, the Pygmys inhabited it, and Greek historians mentioned the existence of the Pygmies in North Central Africa and Chad which indicates the occurrence of extermination or displacement of them
A lot of Khoisans died for that fact
They ended up just like how the europeans of south africa and rhodesia ended. A long long way from Mukumbura
Damn so the Bantu are the same as both Dutch and German settlers ? 💀
The fact that we can trace most modern African Languages back thousands of years before human civilization astounds me.
@Hernando Malinche Well, except Indo-European. The Indo-European expansion must have wiped out all their closely related groups.
@@ikengaspirit3063 not really, though. PIE and proto-finno-ugric have shared vocabulary related to trade, suggesting that the groups (that both exist today) coexisted and interacted.
@@ts-wo6pp I mean, but they still weren't closely related. Its just loan words.
@@ikengaspirit3063 if something were closely related to pie it would be grouped into pie. that's how it works, like definitionally.
@@ts-wo6pp But the fact that PIE is relatibely younger than most language families but has no relatives implies PIE absorbed them during the IndoEuropean expansion
Mande gradually decreased as Arabic became more prevalent in Mauritania
Tbf, Nilo-Saharan, Chadic and Berber were already expanding in that region as well.
RIP
💪🏽💪🏽💪🏽💪🏽
Sanhaja and Masmouda Berber tribes came also, long before Arabs
Mande languages followed by kordofanian and Ijoid are the oldest African languages and closest to the original ancient Saharan language. These groups are also the origins of the E1b1a paternal haplogroup that most subsaharan Africans come from.
The genetics matches the linguistic and migration pattern in your video. Good work 👍
E1b1a1 or E-M2
E1a
No what you say is not true. Actually mande groups lost all nouns classes and develop tone. Mande, ijoid, Dogon are so different to other Niger Congo languages that it means they diverged so earlier from the Nigercongo tree. And since they all have the same ancestor, none is oldest than other.
I'll start with an example, the english language developed 5th-7th century AD from a germanic parent language. Just because English and German have the same root does not mean one is not older than the other. Its like saying two kids have the same parents so one can't be older than the other. That's nonsensical.
As the earliest branch of the Niger Congo this makes Mande, iJoid and Dogon the to be the older in its spoken form than other branches. @@lodewijkvandoornik3844
@@lodewijkvandoornik3844 he’s saying they are the older siblings and that’s genetic fact they are some of the oldest group in the region groups diverged and create new groups
Thank you ! I always wondered where and when it started and how it spread so quickly.
Good job, keep the good work !
Thank you
Amazing video, as always. The sources I assume were used in the research may be slightly dated, as, these days, Kordofanian is generally no longer classified as Niger-Congo by linguistic circles. There are other smaller ongoing disputes over the family classification too.
Thank you. Indeed, Katla and Rashad is disputed but Talodi-Heiban is generally accepted as Niger-Congo
There are indeed ongoing disputes over language classification with respect to Niger-Congo, but Kordofanian is still generally classified as Niger-Congo, just not a distinct branch of Niger-Congo.
@Ares simply because the Boers stayed on the South western coast before venturing further north and east
its amazing how the history of many african language groups dates back longer than that of the indo european and semitic language groups
Well to be fair the Semitic language group is from the Afroasiatic group which is almost as old as Niger Congo.
Did you know that Amhara, an African language, is semitic?
Amazing map, it's incredible to know that african languages exists since that very long period of time compared to language families from other continents
Thank you
not that they existed earlier, but that they could be tracked earlier. In part I guess its because most sub-groupings of the initial lineage were all successful instead of one later lineage destroying all the rest.
First humans from africa
I had always been curious about this one because I couldn't grasp how most of Sub-Saharan Africa had languages which belonged to the one family. The answer is they could simply trace them all the way back to 12,000 years ago. Far earlier than the beginnings of other major language families.
Technically most other language families started earlier, like austronesian
@@esti-od1mzevidence?
@@uniformityofnature1488 The linguists basically state how old a language family is by considering how much cognate words differ over time. I hope this helps.
@@esti-od1mz austronesian is younger than anything in Africa
@@stanleydouge2803 not true, sorry. Older than the khoi-san? Sure. Older than the bantu? I don't think so. It is possible to clarify the age of a linguistic family with scientific accurancy: while there are possibly older language families in Africa, it is not the case for the whole continet...
Good video, could you do the Afro-Asiatic languages? Or just the Amazigh languages?
Thank you. I plan to make them in the future
@@CostasMelas remember to also do one for the Nilo-saharan phylum
@@CostasMelas I look forward to your take on Afro-Asiatic languages. Chadic and Cushitic in particular.
Bantu: "Is for me?"
Yeeee boiii
Khoisan people: please no
Edit: I now realise they probably nostly integrated into the Khoisan culture at the time
@@monkeypie8701 The South-Cushitic languages were pretty miffed as well, I can tell you.
Literally introducing divisions already 10000 years ago. My Indo-European brain can't comprehend this.
Really nice . You deserve more subs and respect . How much time you need for one video btw ??
Thank you. I made this in parallel with the Nilo-Saharan. They both took me over three months
Please next do the Khoisan languages (Khoe-Kwadi is probably related to Sandawe), the Altaic languages, the Afro-Asiatic, the Austroasiatic, the Dene-Yeniseian, Basque-Iberian (or ancient Iberia, in general), Sino-Tibetan, Eskimo-Aleut, Uto-Aztecan, and Australian languages.
That's insane how they survive for 10,000 years..
Btw Great animating
Thank you
Not even that 11,500 years
I wonder what languages were being spoken in the rest of West Africa (eg. most of the Guinea Coast) prior to the Niger-Congo languages spreading all across the area as well as what ethnic groups existed in those areas at that time.
Hunter gatherers more or less related to pygmies and san
Can't say much about what languages they might have spoken, but they were Basal West Africans who migrated there from East Africa between 30-50kya.
@@mikailm6934 No they were were not Pygmy or Khoisan related. They were Basal West Africans who were in turn diverged from ancient East Africans
@@TitanTribble no, basal West africans are those who brought Niger Congo languages from the green Sahara, they mixed with West African hunter gatherers
@@mikailm6934 That's what I meant.
As always, amazing! Thank you!
Thank you
Sweat, I have been waiting for Niger Congo!
This timeline really goes back 11,000 years. Holy crap. Has to be the oldest language family ever.
Proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken probably 15-20 thousand years ago
Afro-asiatic language next please 💙
The epic moment we've been waiting for
Thank you
@@CostasMelas hey
Where did you get the info from ?
Wow 9500 BC, that be a long time
Interesting how far the Bantus spread.
You can thank genocide for that
@@monkeypie8701 White man's cope.
@@monkeypie8701 this is your third comment here lol You're obsessed
Great video as always! Could you do Amazigh languages next ?
Thank you. I haven't decided yet. Most likely something about the Afroasiatic family
🇲🇦🇩🇿🇱🇾🇹🇳
@@CostasMelas Cushitic language please
Great video, I really like your language family ones. It's interesting to watch the map slowly morph over time.
What programs do you use to make these? I assume you use one program to make individual slides then animate them with another program.
Thank you. I use paintnet and blender
Don't forget that until around 4000 BC Sahara used to be a Savanna! Crazy when you think about it it!
Cushitic languages when? Idk why it wasn't just a part of a larger Afro-Asiatic languages video but oh well.... love your content, man.
Nice video, a lot of hardwork i can see. But i think you should've made separate videos on Niger and congo languages since you made separate videos on Indo Iranian and Indo Aryan languages.
Thank you. I may return in the future with more detailed videos about each branch
Note that Niger-Congo is not a demonstrated family, as not all genetic links have been established and there is big question marks as to if these groups are even related. Not saying this video is bad, but until further research is done, Atlantic-Congo is currently the largest PROVEN family in Africa.
Still a great video!
Thank you
Make the video about Dravidian languages please🙏
Atlantic Congo, Mandé, Kordofanian (talodi, katla), Voltaic, Ijoid, Dogon, kwa, Benue, kru, bantoid, gur, senufo, adawama-ubangi, bantú
Benue: so, my cousin, how big do you want to become?
Bantu: *y e s*
Great video! Next video:History of Sino-Tibetan languages
Thank you
Great video, are you planning to make a separate video about the Tocharian languages as Frigian and Armenian or do not plan anymore?
Thank you. It is the last of the Indo-European. I plan to do so when I have completed my research into the three sub-branches of the Tocharian
Fyi, Proto-Indo-European was still the only Indo-European language here at 5:32.
you know all of that are just theories and that Costas Melas only does what he want
Actually Anatolian split a bit earlier so it would be around 5:00
For those who know, why is it that linguists can look at this group of languages, which are often pretty poorly attested or at least have very short and recent recorded histories, and find this relationship from around 10,000BC? On the contrary, with Indo-European they can only go as far back as around 4,000BC and cannot reliably link it to any other language family, despite the fact that multiple IE branches have very good attestation, which also goes back to very early times. (e.g. Greek, Hittite, Latin, Sanskrit, Avestan)
There is a lot of speculation going on in comparative linguistics
many proposed language families are purely hypothetical and have no reconstructed Proto-language.
Proposed "Macrofamilies" usually lack evidence and the more you go back in time, the likelier it becomes that superficially similar language families do not actually share common descent, but gained their similarities from a Sprachbund.
Indo-European is among the most well attester language families and has the largest number of reconstructed lemmas for a language family ancestor. Niger-Congo on the other hand is still speculative since the connection to Mandé hasn't been fully established yet. That's why some researchers just talk about Volta-Congo or something different
Can you made one of the entire Afro-Asiatic family?
The empire of Mali is very interesting I would like to know more about them
Is there tension between bantus and khoisan?
In Botswana there is much trouble, for instance.
In Botswana they are exploited as cheap pabour, but in South Africa no one even acknowledges that they exist.
The family of which I knew less! Thank you Costas!
You're welcome :)
Adamawa-Ubangi missed the opportunity to take over East and Southern Africa before the Bantus arrived. All the other language groups were locked up in West Africa and had nowhere to expand to.
Until a certain (not well defined) age, the Sahara and the Gabon-Congo rainforest must have been two formidable barriers.
For instance: the taming of camels is thought to have happened in the second half of the II millennium BC. Without camels, travelling through the Sahara must have been really hard (though the Sahara was probably more narrow than now).
Moreover, in an age in which the population was not numerous and the Sahel and Sudanic savannas were more fertile than now, the West-African Sudanic strip must have been felt as sufficient for human life for many centuries, so that there was not an urge to emigration. Maybe Bantu migrations began when the population had increased and the quest for new lands and new resources had begun to be felt stronger than the obstacle of the rainforest.
Well said.@@grantottero4980
It's a lie. We were in the green Sahara prior to 5000 BC. And archaeological evidence proves the ancestors of modern Khoi & San groups were as far north as upper Egypt. There is no evidence of Bantu and modern west Africans existence in west Africa prior to 4000-3000 years ago. Only the small stature hunter gather are adapted to the dense forests prior to West Africans clearing the forests for agriculture and pastoralism. The 2020 study in Shum Laka Cameroon proves as much.
Was it the Bantu people or Austronesian people that reached Madagascar first?
The Austronesians.
To permanently settled the place anyway, there's proof that it was infrequently visited before the austronesian Malagasy arrived.
Madagascar is part of Bantu East Africa. It been settled by Swahili and other pygmies people. Austronesians are not Africans.
I love it!
Please do Mande languages. We speak two of them that happen to be mutually unintelligible (Bambara and Soninké) and it frustrates the hell out of me why they're classified as being from the same family
It is a fact that African language families are generally reviewed after each new thesis and their study continues. At the moment, these languages are grouped
@@CostasMelas I see
Not being mutually intelligible is not enough not to be considered outside the same family
@@maazi.naaniya9158 Tell me more. This is too vague
@@alpha791 Soninke numbers list
1 - baane
2 - fillo
3 - sikko
4 - naxato
5 - karago
6 - tumu
7 - ñeru
8 - segu
9 - kabu
10 - tanmu
Bambara numbers list
1 - kélen
2 - fila
3 - sàba
4 - náani
5 - dúuru
6 - wɔɔrɔ
7 - wólonwula
8 - séegin
9 - k̀ɔnɔntɔn
10 - tán
Why did the languages decrease after European Colonisation? Do they speak Portuguese, French etc now?
Yes, colonial languages remain official as a solution to the problem of multilingualism of the African states
@@CostasMelas Thanks but I was asking whether the people have stopped speaking their native languages as a result, as the full color becomes lined
@@aayushagarwal4138 most still speak their language but also speak a European language.
@@aayushagarwal4138 no. Most still speak their language in addition to European language. Some languages are in danger of extinction but not because of European languages but other languages in the same family or other families. E.g many groups in northern Nigeria speak their language in addition to Hausa, an Afro Asiatic language of the chadic family. Many people speak it as a second language but some still as a first leaving their language at risk of extinction.
No, i think this is just reflecting the use of languages as an 'official' language for government etc, to solve the problem that there are so many African languages! South Africa has 12 official languages and 35 languages in total. Indeed the problem going to deep Moçambique etc, it finding someone who does speak a European language!
Hey I just subscribed yesterday and now you uploaded. Great video, i love your channel!
Thank you
@@CostasMelas you're welcome, would you like to visit Micahistory 2?
Do the pre-history cultures and archeological industries of the world.
Nice Video
Thank you
Make a history of the sino-caucas languages!!
Please make afro asiatic, Dravidian and languages of America.
Make about Berber, Cushitic and other Afroasiatic languages
As a Berber I'm 100% with you 👍
It is impossible that there are no historical documents or scientific evidence or archaeological or genetic studies
Everyother NC language: *small patches*
Bantu: *BIG BOI*
You can thank genocide for that
OG BIG BOI were the Khoisan
@@monkeypie8701 no genocide, stop spreading that lie
@@monkeypie8701 that's false
@@TitanTribble ok
@@monkeypie8701 they weren't BIG BOI though they had a fraction of the land of the bantu and the southern cushites had already pushed them down south
What language family dominated southern Africa before the bantu expansion? Khoisan?
Yeah most likely but I heard that Khoisan isn't even one language family but multiple that got grouped together because they all have all those clicking sounds.
Khoisan people
@@monkeypie8701 Yeah. But people and language is not the same thing.
@@seethrough_treeshrew oh yeah, I didn't read the question properly
The Khoe-Kwadi, Tuu, and K’xa families. Though, interestingly, Khoe-Kwadi’s lineage is also intrusive to Southern Africa.
Thousands of years these languages were in Africa but colonialism destroyed them.
Imagime all those languages that Bantu killed
@@ermin2248 barely any, few tribal ppl were there
A majority of these languages are still spoken all that changed is people either learn English or French becasue every country in Africa has like 20 different languages spoken in them
Actually most of the languages survived colonialism.
@@noahtylerpritchett2682 most of them are half-dead
Good video 👍
Can You Do a video About us The Berbers
Thank you. I plan to make videos about the Afroasiatic family
The Niger-Congo Language family is completely hypothetical.
No it’s not really,it’s agreed by most scholars,but some of the branches are still in dispute whether they are in the same language family,Atlantic Congo is 100% confirmed to be a single language family
The problem with this entire video is that Niger-Congo is not a proven language phylum as required by the standard historical comparative method. In other words, it is a non-existing language grouping. At best it is a hypothesis. But there is not a single study which does the ground work to establish this as a valid language construct. I dare any reader to fund such a source. The entire grouping is based on selective mass sound comparisons and typological analysis; all which are not used in the comparative method. All of Greenberg's phyla was categorized with this mass-comparative method. Instead of starting from scratch, researchers like Blench, Ehret, Takacs, and others just simply kept it and have for years attempted to put round pegs in square holes. Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afro-Asiatic, and Khoisan, all scientific frauds. These phyla are the Piltdown man of linguistics.
The atlantic congo grouping is proven. The only questions are about the Mande, Ijaw and Kordofan languages but as the first two are genetically linked with other West africans(Bantu included), they share a common ancestor for sure
@@mikailm6934 There is not one single text in existence that has shown that Niger-Congo exist as a result of applying the comparative method. If so, can you please drop the text and author here? Thank you in advance.
@@AsarImhotep All his sources are put after his presentation
@@mikailm6934 None of his source material are texts that demonstrates, using the comparative method, that Niger-Congo exist as a valid construct. It is hard for those outside of the historical linguistic space to understand what I am saying. But language families are established using the comparative method and none of Joseph Greenberg's phyla were established by this method.
@@AsarImhotep have you even read the whole text?
Do cushitic next
Hold up! I read somewhere else that the original African is from Sudan. And i've also noticed that the Senegalese have very similar both physically and culturally to the South Sudanese.
Perhaps it meant the Sudanian savanna, not the present-day state of Sudan
The meaning of the word "Sudan" (from Arabic: "the place of the Black") shrinked to only the two present States who bear that name only through a process which started in the last decades of XIX century and ended in the last 30 years of XX c.
--- Before, it meant all the savanna strip going from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.
--- In colonial age, for instance, Mali was called "French Sudan (Soudan Français)" until 1959.
--- The shrinkage became because it was originated by a misinterpretation of the name of "Anglo-Egyptian Sudan" (which originally meant only "the part of Sudan area which is / was dominated jointly by the Britons and the Egyptians", but after the independence of the region became the name of the new country).
Yes wolof have no similarity with Niger congolese language. It is very close to Dinka/Nuer of south sudan. I dont know what criterion linguistic are based on..wolof dont share anything with fulani diola ( only contact) however classified in the same family.We share a lot of word often with same meaning with dinka and Nuer tribe name family, culture name of person....wolof in this family must be review.. wolof have his own singularity....siwali and all bantu language have nothing in common with wolof...
Im wolof from Sénégal 🇸🇳.
@@maramediop9647Wolof is a Niger Congolese language and it has no similarities with Dinka or Nuer. I have South Sudanese friends and every time I play them Wolof music, they seem to always say WTH are they singing about…Wolof sounds a bite different from other Niger Congolese languages because it is not a tonal language like the other languages in the family
Super
Thank you
@@CostasMelas I like your job, it has to be hard
Good job
Thank you
Great video, thank you!
One thing seemed surprising to me - why do you think the expansion of the Atlantic languages to the more eastern areas (like Nigeria and Cameroon) occured so fast and so late (between 1500 - 1800 AD), when they were for thousands of years limited only to the quite distant west coast? Are there any indications for this, e.g. in the connection with the colonisation? Otherwise, I would expect that expansion to be much more slower and earlier, probably happening the whole time parallelly with the Volta-congo group. Or even earlier, as the Atlantic languages are in minority in the east, so they might be considered remnants after more recent Volta-congo expansion. What do you think about this interpretation?
Thank you. The fast expansion is likely related with the usage of iron metallurgy by the Bantu peoples near the Victoria Lake around 200 BC- 100 AD
@@CostasMelas I am not sure I understand. Maybe you answered a different question: "What caused the Bantu (orange) expansion to the south"?
But I am asking about the expansion of Atlantic languages (light blue) from the west coast (like Guinea etc.) to the east (e.g. Nigeria) between 1500 and 1800 AD, as shown in your video. I do not see how this would be related with usage of iron metallurgy by Bantus somewhere else and 2000 years ago.
@Jankus to answer your question, the cause for the spread is a specific group of nomadic pastoralists collectively known as the Fula. Fulas speak a language belonging to the Atlantic branch. Fulanis (as they are called in Nigeria) supposedly had been traveling across West Africa since the 14th century while looking for grazing land. Once they became Islamicized however, they invaded Northern Nigeria in a series of jihads between the late 18th and mid 19th centuries. Now they live there.
Can you do a separate video about the bantu languages
Do the yenissian-dene languages next! (Xiongnu is believed to be a yenissian language)
Xiognu was mongolian,Hunish was turkic
@@albanian_barcelona_fan Mongolian didn’t even exist back then. Proto-Mongolic (the ancestral language of all Mongolian languages) was spoken around the time of Genghis Khan so not even that long ago. Whatever the Xiongnu spoke, it wasn’t Mongolic, though maybe it was related to it. In my opinion though, it’s likely that the Xiongnu spoke several languages seeing as they weren’t one ethnic group but a confederation of different people.
@@captainch6182 Yes but their lingua franca was a para-mongolian language,meaning ancestor of proto mongolian.
@@captainch6182 there is actually good evidence that the xiongnu spoke yenissian.
As they did migrate west. They did begin to speak Turkic.
@ippos_khloros en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeniseian_languages
Please Pama-Nyungan languages
I'm trying to think what is the most oldest language in history cuz I feel like Proto-Niger-Congo Isa big contender if it existed in the year 9500 BC when civilisation dint even exist and pretty much before agriculture existed
The oldest identifiable phylum is Afro-Asiatic, whose age of common unity I’ve read is about 13,500 years ago. That precedes Niger-Congo by about 2 millennia. Though, every language’s history is as long as any others. It’s just that linguists can sometimes determine when the family to which a language or languages belong is older than another’s.
However, bear in mind that there are caveats to consider for Niger-Congo. Mande and Ijoid are two conventional members that show so few diagnostic Niger-Congo traits that their status as independent language families is considerably is easier to entertain. That doesn’t take away from the 9,500 BCE age for Niger-Congo, though.
@@wachuku1 11,500 BC wow and ye ofcourse every languages history goes back tens of thousands of years till we were able to speak about 200,000 years ago I believe
How the hell did the bantu migrate so far
They had iron, farming and cattle herding.
The non Bantu populations had smaller stone age hunter gatherer populations
@@noahtylerpritchett2682 Cattle herding wasn't universal among Bantu and Khoi-Khoi had cattle.
@@ikengaspirit3063well the Bantu had iron which the khoi and twa didn’t and they introduced those things to those populations
how do you mke those lines?? i would love to try and make them aswell its fascinating
You can use a pattern from any graphic editor program
@@CostasMelas thanks for the info. sadly im a phone user. and i dont own a pc. is there anyway on mobile?
The bantus are like the italics of their family, great expansion
You can thank genocide for that
Bantu are more comparable to Indo-Europeans.
@@ikengaspirit3063 yes but no. Indo europeans were warriors with calvalry who rulled the european farming populations. Bantu were the farmers so they are more like ancient european farmers(anatolian farmers)
@@mikailm6934 True. Thanks for the correction
@@mikailm6934no indoeuropeans were mostly pillagers and sometimes peacefully mixed with the neolithic farmers,also don’t forget indoeuropeans were a mix of neolithic Anatolian farmers and caucasian hunter gatherers
Bantus had farming and cattle raising/ herding and Iron.
Pre Bantus had stone and hunting. Less population than Bantus. Who had more. That being said the Bantus didn't kill everyone. A lot of mixing happened too
I think the majority of the bantus mixed with the pygmies of the equatorial area, the period when they spread till there, so they brought those features to the east & southern Africa. I can't guess something else why the majority of the bantus have different features from their north nigritoid prehistoric ancestors (west & north-central sudanic/sahelian Africa)!!!
Somewhere I read that the Africans of the last area I spoke about, are called nigrids (mande, wolof, voltaic, adamawa-ubangi, yoruba, igbo, kru, kwa, etc). So I think we have the nigrids, the semi-bantus (Cameroon) & the bantus in the niger-congo language family!!!
Some Pre-Bantus in East Africa did have agriculture and cattle(the Cattle gotten from Kushitics) but even then they still maintained very low population densities for some reason(well, on the agriculture side, they didn't have the sort of efficient agriculture that allows for fully sedentary living so their agriculture was more there to complement their primarily hunter-gatherer lifestyle).
@@Fallacia_Konstantinos Yeah, we consistently see significant African Hunter Gatherer genes among the Bantu and other Forest African peoples like the Igbo.
@@ikengaspirit3063 Also, a serious population amount of the Azante tribe, has some admixture from the pygmies!!!
Bantus mixed with locals. They did not kill.
how do they research this without any written scripts?
Linguistic, archeology, genetics..
That should put to rest the Afrocentric theory that Niger-Congo people are responsible for the ancient Egyptian civilization or descend from it.
Ancient egyptian are afro-asiatic
what is that spot in the middle of Kenya Tanzania?
Nilotic
Hey can you guys do a video on the spread of afro asiatic
Es increíble como se minimiza la expansión batu siendo que esta representa en términos territoriales el de casi toda Europa y sigue vigente, definitivamente se sigue discriminando y restado importancia a África y su historia precolonialista
La gente ni sabe que lugares como Mali alguna vez fueron grandes centros de cultura y comercio que llegaron a ser imperios poderosos, mucho gente en Europa llegó a pensar que en el reino de Mali las calles eran de oto
Could you share your references? I teach a linguistics course and know this would be great for the students.
this music slaps what's its name
wtf is Atlantic?
1:05 I see Pumba !
Ur mom?
Ur mom?
Ur mom?
Yeah you got me! I'm Pumba's son !
Proto pumba
We only have a few African language families left:
Berber
Chadic
Cushitic
Khoisan
Who told you this? There are many hundreds of African languages, unless I am misunderstanding you.
@@greeenjeeens language family
@@MarcTelang I see, my apologies
The big bantu expansion.
Khoisan genocide
@@monkeypie8701 bantus are not whites. It was more of a cultural genocide. Also, khoisan mixed with bantus rather than bantus mixing with khoisan. The real khoisan genocide was at the hands of the great white people
@@satanshameer690 I didn't say Bantu were white, Bantu are majority black today
@@monkeypie8701 He seems to be implying White people are exclusively capable of committing genocide.
@@hersirivarr1236 hmm, yeah nah
Just imagine how many language families were erased by the Bantu expansion.
Bantus never erased any languages but many non Bantu people do learn to speak Bantu languages.
Surely a huge number.
Maybe like 2,it was probably ruled by the Khoisan language families.
Africa has a great history
Can you do afro Asiatic pls
This music reminds me of Historia Civilis
To shaw similarities, Bantu call meat nyama, the Akan of Ghana call it nam
Ijo people call it nama
@@cheruvskiyanawanti1120Sesotho in South Africa also call it Nama.
The igbo call it anu.
Bantu is not a tribe. So to say Bantu call meat nyama is not true.
Why didnt you divide bantu into its sub groups or languages like Zulu and Swahili?
I plan to make them a more detailed video for each branch. It is impossible to do it for the whole family because each branch is divided into at least 10-50 languages.
The same reason he didn’t divide any other subgroup
How can we know all of that knowing those didn't use any script or written form ? What things subsist ? I'm talking about before graphic prints.
We know from indirect evidence such as artifacts, expansion of pastoralism, agriculture, iron metallurgy in Africa etc
@@CostasMelas So it's more like a ethnic-based progression map video ?
In their was scripts in west Africa Ndsibidi for example used by the ekoid and Igbos and even reaching as far as Cameroon it also gave rise to two new world scripts one in Cuba one in Haiti the Haitian one is called vèvè
Do thé berber langauages
Do you have any sources for this?
Various books and scholar articles but the main source is R. Blench - Archaeology, Language, and the African Past
No
I want reperations for my khoisan ancestors.
Esoteric
Africa: "We have Indo-Europeans at home."
Indo-Europeans at home:
😍 beautiful
Bantu: *spreads*
Indo-European: You learned this business!
The Portuguese breached a planetary quarantine
Odd thing for a virus to posit
There sould be a small dot pack of Mande in the area of Algero-moroccan borders.
wish bantu people had 1 nation all speaking the same dilect
It is a dream, just like dreaming about pan-slavism or dreaming that all romance-speaking countries, from Italy to Brasil, from France to Chile, from Romania to Mexico, unite and re-create a new Roman Empire, greater than the previous one... Not feasable.
@@grantottero4980Prussia did it. unified most germanic people made themselves a county for germanic people. Russia did it. france ,Italy ,UK and evan spain United those whom are similar to them. no country in Africa like that exists because we believe it can be done peacefully. it can't people won't step down they must be removed by force. it's possible not all Bantu people but a country with a large part of us.
@@xavierblitz5647 Во многих Африканских странах местные языки вытесняются языками бывших колонизаторов. Например: Ангола. В Анголе почти повсеместно доминирует Португальский язык. Даже между собой, на бытовом уровне ангольцы используют португальский язык, а не язык своих местных этносов.
Isn't there quite a bit of ambiguity in African linguistics still?
can you please make a video about the spread of language families like the connection of Indo-European and dravidic languages
Only hypothetical, but not demonstrated.
@@grantottero4980all languages or most are related in some way to each other just some are closer to others,maybe exceptions would be Khoisan or andaman