Research on the Bantu Languages in Europe:History and Status Quo
New demands appear for humanities studies on Africa in the new era along with the Sino-African cooperation and the development of African research disciplines;the local African languages are an important basis for African research of humanities.The population using the Bantu languages account for over a quarter of the total African population,with a research history of over a century in international academic circles.Through my own research experience and observation in Europe regarding the Bantu languages this paper sorts out the European history and status quo of research on the Bantu languages.First,an introduction is made to the classification and use of Bantu languages as well as their basic grammatical structures and hot re-search issues,pointing out the Bantu languages'grammatical features in-clude quasi-noun system,the dependent morphology with verb as core,and rich agreement relationships syntactically.Then,it presents the development process from pre-colonial Europe's demand for religious document transla-tion to the establishment of research disciplines,summarizing the contribu-tions by such representative scholars as Bleek,Meinhof,Meeussen and Guthrie in different eras.It also introduces the recent research projects and achievements of major contemporary European institutions of Bantu langua-ges such as Ghent University(Belgium)and Leiden University(Holland).Finally,it envisions the development of research on the Bantu languages in China and the future research cooperation models with indigenous African scholars.
research on indigenous African languagesBantu languagesEuropean linguistics historySino-African research cooperation
万方数据
维普
