Africa's lack of linguistic diversity is due largely to the success of Bantu-speaking people.
The Mijikenda include nine Bantu-speaking ethnic groups in the Kaya forests of coastal Kenya.
Even after they were freed from slavery the Bantu were denied political representation and rights to land ownership.
These are Indo-European, Bantu, Austronesian (from South-East Asia and the Pacific) and Uto-Aztecan (the native vernaculars of the Americas).
ECONOMIST: The evolution of language: Babel or babble? | The
For their studies, the team studied the characteristics of word order in four language families: Indo-European, Uto-Aztec, Bantu and Austronesian.
Ethnically distinct from Somalis, the Somali Bantu have always been social outcasts.
Nine ethnic groups - the Mbum, Sara, Banda, Gbaya, Bantu, Pygmies, Oubanguiens, Ngbandi, Nzakara Zande - inhabit this country of 2.3 million people.
Even the recently formed United Democratic Movement, an effort by an Afrikaner, Roelf Meyer, and an African, Bantu Holomisa, to gather multi-racial support, is favoured by just 4% of voters.
To do so he looked at three well-studied parts of the linguistic family tree: the Bantu languages of Africa, the Indo-European group from Eurasia and the Austronesians of the Pacific.
ECONOMIST: Languages and species evolve in surprisingly similar ways
Central to the cultural space of Palenque de San Basilio is the palenquero language, the only creole language in Latin America with a lexical Spanish basis and grammatical characteristics of Bantu languages.
Around a third of the vocabulary differences between modern Bantu speakers arose this way, around a fifth of the differences between speakers of Indo-European languages, and around a tenth of the Austronesians.
ECONOMIST: Languages and species evolve in surprisingly similar ways
One of the most typical movements is the famous belly push, the umbigada, a testimony of Bantu influence, used by the dancer to invite her successor into the centre of the circle.
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