The Bantu poetic traditions: Interfaces between language and versification

The aim of this paper is to analyse the versification practices of four Bantu languages—Swahili, Tswana, Zulu and Chewa—in a comparative perspective. This comparison is based on the fact that the suprasegmental phonologies of these four languages share a common feature, penultimate lengthening. It will be claimed that penultimate lengthening is the main linguistic feature that organises the line in the poetic traditions taken into account. As a linguistic phenomenon, penultimate lengthening shows some variation in its function among the four languages: it will be shown that this corresponds to analogous variations in the versification practices. The ultimate aim of this paper is to encourage further research in the field of stylistics of Bantu poetic traditions, a domain where joint work between linguists and scholars in literary studies could lead to innovative and fruitful results.