Is There Really a Common Linguistic Ancestor for All the Pygmies?

Anthropos. 2020. Vol. 115. No. 2. P. 540–542.

Starostin G.

The ethnic, cultural, and linguistic prehistory of the so-called Pygmy populations of Central Africa remains one of the most important and exciting issues in African studies, given the striking anthropologic, cultural, and genetic differences between the Pygmies and most other ethnic groups of the continent. Although existing literature on the Pygmies is quite extensive, it is remarkable that very few, if any, serious comparative studies on their linguistic heritage have been produced so far, despite the availability of lexical and grammatical data on most varieties of Pygmy languages. As the author of the work under review correctly notes in the introduction, this is largely due to the tacit assumption that all modern Pygmy languages are essentially dialectal varieties of the languages of their more technologically advanced neighbors —Bantu, Ubangi, and East Central Sudanic. This assumption omits the important fact that there are many elements in Pygmy idioms that are not traceable back to their donor languages and could, therefore, be qualified as potential substrate remains from the original Pygmy languages. While the identification of such elements is not likely to help reconstruct these original languages in sufficient detail, their comparison may at least shed some light on the important issue of whether some or all modern Pygmy groups used to share common linguistic ancestry.

Keywords: African languages, языки Африки, pygmies, пигмеи