Thesis
French
ID: <
10670/1.1mk8wg>
Abstract
This dissertation is presenting a linguistic classification based on phylogenetic methods borrowed from biology. The sample of languages considered here belongs to the Bantu family, a linguistic sub branch of Niger-Congo languages spoken in Africa. Numerous publications have shown a complexity and the diversity of Bantu languages. Our study focus on the North-West region which includes the following countries: Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo and Democratic Republic of Congo. This new classification is based on the comparison of lexical items. We have organized a database including 100 words from the basic vocabulary for 207 languages. Several tree representations were obtained by using Neighbor-Joining (Saitou and Nei, 1987) and Neighbor-Net (Bryant and Moulton, 2004) algorithms.This study allows us to get a better understanding of the linguistic proximity of these languages. It also provides a historical scenario for Bantu migrations.