2014
XXVI, 373 pp.
Appendix: Topographical Synopsis of Lexical Data, 99 Colour Cartograms with Annotations, Index
Text language: English
The empirical basis of the Kamba Dialect Atlas is a compilation of about 36,000 lexical items collected in over 60 locations within the Kamba speaking area of Kenya between 1970 and 1990. The items were raised with the help of questionnaires containing between 600 and 640 keywords drafted in English and in Swahili. The Kamba documentation belongs to a comprehensive research project that includes all languages of Central Kenya Bantu on the slopes and in the neighbourhood of Mount Kenya from Igembe in the Northeast up to Gikuyu and Kamba in the Southwest.
Whereas the first part of the data was already published in 1974, a larger portion of publishable data concerning particularly the Kamba dialects had to be left behind because of mass problems. In the meantime, powerful computers equipped with an adequate dialectometrical software enable us to analyse and compare any amount of dialectological data at the same time.
Dialectological analyses make visible the communicational network of Central Kenya Bantu and the dominant position of Kamba within that network. Its growth and its permanent re-structuring over the past centuries were caused by cultural exchange and far distance trade between the East African coast and the people of the hinterland. Some Kamba dialects had a dominant position within the communicational network. In the period of the pre-colonial trade in the 17th and 18th centuries, the eastern Kamba dialects of Mumoni and Kitui acted as important intermediaries. At the beginning of the colonial period, the western Kamba dialect of Masaku gained a supra-regional importance. It has kept this position up to the present.
Like a history book, the Atlas shows the various mechanisms of contact and internal cultural development that have influenced and shaped the modern dialectal landscape of Kamba and its adjacent Bantu neighbours in a temporal perspective comprising several centuries. Thus, it is not only a tool of comparative Bantu studies, but also of contact linguistics in general.
Another volume of this series is dedicated to the analysis of the Kenyan coastal Swahili dialects and of their neighbouring Bantu and Cushitic languages:
Under these links you will find publications by the author, various dialectological / dialectometrical studies and grammatical descriptions, text collections and dictionaries of further eastern, south-eastern and south-western Bantu languages and cultures:
