Phonetic and phonological research on hunter-gatherer substrate interference in the West-Coastal Bantu homeland region Some preliminary results and methodological remarks Lorenzo Maselli1,2, Sara Pacchiarotti1,2, Koen Bostoen1 1Universiteit Gent, 2Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen Abstract Today, the linguistic landscape of the Congo Basin rainforest is predominantly Bantu (Niger-Congo), except for Ubangi and Nilo-Saharan languages in its northwestern and northeastern fringes respectively. In contrast to southern Africa, where “Khoisan” languages have survived the ravages of time, the last hunter-gatherers of central Africa no longer have a language (family) “of their own”. In the quest for a substrate to reveal something of their now disappeared languages, phonological data have rarely been considered. The southern Congolian forest-savannah mosaic hosts some of the last remaining Central African hunter-gatherer communities, as well as the homeland of one of the major branches of the Bantu family, i.e. West-Coastal Bantu (Pacchiarotti et al. 2019). Strikingly enough, the Bantu B70-80 languages currently spoken in that homeland region manifest several peculiar phonological and morphosyntactic features that are rather atypical from a Common Bantu point of view: rare vowel harmonies, umlaut effects, final vowel loss, systems of 9 and more vowels, uncommon labial-velar stops and affricates, fusions of verb suffixes producing abnormal verbal bases and rare polysemies, such as causative/applicative syncretism, absence of passive morphology, etc. (Daeleman 1977; Rottland 1977; Bostoen & Mundeke 2011a, b; Koni Muluwa & Bostoen 2011, 2012; Pacchiarotti & Bostoen 2021, forthcoming). The data gathered by the BantUGent research group in the region suggest that the Central African linguistic landscape might be significantly more varied than was previously assumed. According to a recent hypothesis (Pacchiarotti & Bostoen: forthcoming), building on earlier research in the area by Möhlig (1977, 1981), the presence of velar and uvular fricatives as reflexes of Proto-Bantu *k and *g in West-Coastal Bantu may result – just like the peculiar features listed above – from substrate interference from no longer extant hunter-gatherer languages. Until extensive evidence is gathered through phonetic documentation, such hypotheses are bound to remain highly speculative. In this paper, we present some of the preliminary results of the recently started phonetic and phonological PhD research of the first author on the question of phonological substrate interference in languages from the West-Coastal Bantu homeland region. Key words: phonetic documentation, Pygmy, African linguistics, historical phonology, endangered languages