Linguistic treatments of Bantu languages have traditionally focused on broadly historical/comparative studies or on prototypical characteristics of the family, such as the nominal class system, the complexity of the verbal TAM system, or the tonal system. Consequently, far less attention has been placed upon the nominal phrase as a syntactic unit. To this end, Rugemalira (2007) proposes greater emphasis on Bantu morphosyntax generally. As such, the present study – situated within a broader discussion of the Bantu NP (cf. Chitebeta 2007, Godson & Godson 2015, Lusekelo 2009, Makanjila 2019, Möller 2011, Ondondo 2015, Rugemalira 2007) – builds upon Spier (2016, 2020, 2021) and intro-duces the first descriptive account of the nominal phrase in Ikyaushi, an underdocumented linguistic variety spoken in the Republic of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The data for this study, which arrive from fourteen narratives shared orally by male and female native speakers of the grandparental generation, indicate that seven distinct elements may co-occur with the nominal, but utterances with between one and three co-occurring adnominals are far more frequently attested and more straightforwardly comprehensible to speakers
The article discusses greetings and farewells of a typical conversation in two Bantu languages: Swahili and Zulu. The conversation usually comprises the greeting followed by the enquiry about each other’s well-being, the actual conversation, and then the parting farewell. The article outlines the importance of nonverbal, sociolinguistic, and situational factors of the salutation. The objectives of the paper are to explore the feasibility of considering the salutation in Bantu languages as being uniform, to determine some common trends in the salutation, and to discuss the aspects that may have an impact on the form of the salutation, in languages in general and in Swahili and Zulu in particular.