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Mai-Ndombe is one of the southwestern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ecologically, it can be characterised as a transition zone between a moist, broadleaf rainforest ecotone in the north and shrubland/savannah areas in the south. Linguistically, Mai-Ndombe, along with the rest of southwestern Congo all the way down to the border with Angola, is among the least well-surveyed areas of the planet. Within its borders, several different Bantu (Guthrie's zones B, C, and H) varieties are spoken, near the newly identified West-Coastal Bantu homeland, itself a hot spot of phonological diversity unlike any other in the West-Coastal Bantu domain. Phonetic and phonological accounts of its languages are particularly lacking (apart from impressionistic "grey literature" reports which seldom comply with the standards of present-day phonetic and phonological inquiry). This gap is particularly concerning as Mai-Ndombe is also an area of great anthropological diversity, with numerous hunter-gatherer Twa communities living deep in its eastern and northern forests. Their lects, collectively known as Lotwa, are severely endangered, as they face the threats of social stigma and the growing use of national and regional linguae francae. As part of the author's doctoral project (still underway), phonetic data were collected in the area between May and July 2021, specifically in Inongo (the provincial capital) and Nioki. The present contribution is intended as a brief note on the relevant results produced so far, mainly bearing on the analysis of some phenomena of interest in the languages of the region, including Sakata rhotics and labial–velars and the presence of unusual trilling/flapping realisations in Lotwa. The picture yielded by this preliminary exploration is one of striking phonetic and phonological variation, possibly pointing to earlier stages of greater linguistic diversity than previously supposed. It is also tentatively proposed that one of the specific characteristics of the phenomena attested in the present contribution is that they tend to affect more than one language at a time, working rather as areal "phonetic possibilities" than language-bound outcomes of traditional sound change rules; in this sense, it is suggested that in-depth documentation and description can help broaden our understanding of how language contact works in highly multilingual contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In several Bantu languages in the regions where Kikongo and Lingala are spoken, we encounter sentences where the word 'person' can appear after the subject of a canonical SVO sentence, resulting in a focused interpretation of the subject. Synchronically, we analyze this as a monoclausal focus construction with moto 'person' as a focus marker. Diachronically, we argue, the construction derives from a biclausal cleft, where moto functioned as the head noun of the relative clause. This is a crosslinguistically rare but plausible development. The different languages studied in this paper show variation in the properties indicative of the status of the 'moto construction', which reflects the different stages of grammaticalization. Finally, we show how contact-induced grammaticalization is a likely factor in the development of moto as a focus marker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The supreme being of the ethnic groups which have settled on the Congo estuary, especially the Kongo, Yombe, Kuta, Yansi, Yaka, has characteristics both of celestial and of lower, more local chthonic beings. These characteristics are sometimes understood to he feminine. Among some of these ethnic groups, especially the Yaka, Ndzaambi/Nzambi, the name of the supreme being can also be used for ancestors, Nkisi, chiefs, and the deceased. This leads to the question whether in pre-Christian times one might have thought of the supreme being not in terms of a personal being, but rather in terms of a diffuse sort of power, which was felt operative in all the great and mighty. In this case, the influence of Christianity with its biblical notions of God might have been superimposed on the traditional supreme being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]