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Kuvale: A Bantu language of southwestern Angola

  • Anne-Maria Fehn EMAIL logo

Abstract

This paper uses historical-comparative approaches in combination with quantitative methods to analyse data from a survey of varieties of the Bantu languages Herero and Kuvale spoken by ethnically diverse groups from southwestern Angola. We assess the status and position of the underdocumented “Kuvale” variety in relation to its closest geographic neighbours, and address questions about the history of the area. We find that Kuvale is lexically differentiated from its closest relatives Herero, Wambo and Nyaneka-Nkhumbi and should probably be considered a language in its own right. Within the lexicon and phoneme inventories of the surveyed varieties, no obvious indications of a substrate were found, including in data collected among the formerly Kwadi-speaking Kwepe, and among the Kwisi and Twa foragers, who have been hypothesized to constitute a remnant layer of non-Bantu, non-Khoisan foragers in the Namib desert.

Funding statement: All data was collected as a part of the project “Towards a multidisciplinary population profiling of southern Angola: a key region for understanding human settlement in southern Africa” supported by FEDER funds through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors—COMPETE and by National Funds through FCT—Foundation for Science and Technology under the PTDC/BIA-EVF/2907/2012 and FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-028341. This is scientific paper no. 9 from the Portuguese-Angolan TwinLab established between CIBIO/InBIO and ISCED/Huíla, Lubango.

Acknowledgements

We thank all speakers of Himba, Kuvale and Muhila for their participation in this study, the governments of Namiba and Kunene Provinces in Angola for supporting our work, Teresa and Samuel Aço, Fernanda Lages, João Guerra, Raimundo Dungulo, and Serafim Nemésio for assistance in the preparation of the fieldwork, and António Mbeape and José Domingos for assistance with the data collection. Thanks are also due to the Human Evolutionary Genetics groups at CIBIO/InBIO and the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute in Jena for feedback on the analyses featured in this paper, in particular to Jorge Rocha for many valuable comments on previous versions of this paper. Finally, we would like to extend our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their careful and insightful comments.

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Published Online: 2019-12-10
Published in Print: 2019-12-18

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