Introduction

The roots of Sesotho lie in West Africa, where the common ancestor of all the Bantu languages, Proto-Bantu (PB), was spoken. As its name suggests, PB is a proto-language; it is a hypothetical ancestral language whose existence is confirmed by languages that are regarded as its descendants. It is generally agreed that PB was spoken in the Grassfields Region in the borderland between Nigeria and Cameroon (Bostoen 2018). The language was spoken in this place around 5 000 years ago. It was the migration of PB speakers into different parts of Africa that led to the birth of the many offshoots of PB that would later give birth to the modern Bantu languages such as Sesotho (Bostoen 2018). Figure 1.1 shows the area where PB was spoken. The arrows show the migrations of early PB speakers which finally led to the birth of the modern Bantu languages.

The Evidence for PB

Although there are no written records of PB, there is strong evidence for both its existence and its migration into different regions of sub-Saharan Africa. First, the similarities between what are regarded as its descendants – the more than 400 Bantu languages – support the notion of a common ancestor (Bostoen 2018). All these languages have an elaborate nominal system that classifies nouns according to their prefixes. In addition, these languages have similar phonological systems, and their vocabularies show a high cognation, that is, there are many words with similar roots in these languages.