Pygmy languages

The Pygmies of Equatorial Africa are those "forest people" who have, or recently had, a deep-forest hunter-gather economy and a simple, non-hierarchical societal structure based on bands, are genetically of short stature, have a deep cultural and religious affinity with the Congo forest and live in a generally subservient relationship with agricultural "patrons".

However, these peoples are not related to each other as Pygmies, either ethnically or linguistically. Genetically, different Pygmy peoples have distinct mechanisms for their short stature, demonstrating diverse origins.

An original Pygmy language has been postulated for at least some Pygmy groups. Merritt Ruhlen writes that "African Pygmies speak languages belonging to either to the Nilo-Saharan or Niger–Kordofanian families. It is assumed that Pygmies once spoke their own language(s), but that, through living in symbiosis with other Africans, in prehistorical times, they adopted languages belonging to these two families." The linguistic evidence that such languages existed include Mbenga forest vocabulary which is shared by the neighbouring Ubangian-speaking Baka and Bantu-speaking Aka (although not by the Mbuti) and the Rimba dialect of Punu which may contain a core of non-Bantu vocabulary; if this does represent a common ancestral language rather than borrowing, the ancestral speakers may have been part of a complex of non-Pygmoid languages of hunter-gatherer populations in Africa, whose only surviving descendants today mostly ring the rainforest.

A common hypothesis is that African Pygmies are the direct descendants of the Late Stone Age hunter-gatherer peoples of the central African rainforest, who were partially absorbed or displaced by later immigration of agricultural peoples and adopted their Central Sudanic, Ubangian and Bantu languages. While there is a scarcity of excavated archaeological sites in Central Africa that could support this hypothesis, genetic studies have shown that Pygmy populations possess ancient divergent Y-DNA lineages (especially haplogroups A and B) in high frequencies in contrast to their neighbours (who possess mostly haplogroup E).

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