Book Launch - The Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages

The Centre of African Studies, Lutz Marten, Ellen Hurst-Harosh, N C. Kula, and Jochen Zeller will launch The Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages, the most comprehensive survey of the field of Bantu linguistics to date.

This online-only event will reflect on the current state of Bantu linguistics research as seen through the lens of the Guide, and explore future developments and directions.

The Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages captures the richness and diversity of the language family as evidenced by current linguistic research. Comprising some 81 chapters, written by 96 contributing authors, the 1196-page volume covers a broad spectrum of work on Bantu languages across different theoretical and methodological approaches.

Published in August 2025, the Guide is the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field of Bantu linguistics to date. With about 500 languages, the Bantu family covers an extensive geographical area in Africa, from Cameroon and Kenya in the north, to South Africa in the south, and it is part of the Niger-Congo phylum, one of the world’s biggest language groups. The family includes languages with large speaker numbers, such as isiZulu, Kinyarwanda, and of course Kiswahili, the most widely spoken and taught African language, as well as numerous community languages, many of which are endangered.

Programme

Image: Eva Blue (Unsplash)