The Congo Pygmies are those "forest people" who have, or recently had, a deep-forest hunter-gatherer economy and a simple, non-hierarchical societal structure based on bands, are of short stature, and 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, and demonstrate diverse origins.
Original Pygmy language(s)
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, 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 and the Rimba dialect of Punu which may contain a core of non-Bantu vocabulary; It has been postulated that 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 in high frequencies in contrast to their neighbours. Some 30% of the Aka language is not Bantu, and a similar percentage of the Baka language is not Ubangian. Much of this vocabulary is botanical, and deals with honey collecting or is otherwise specialized for the forest and is shared between the two western Pygmy groups. It has been proposed that this is the remnant of an independent western Pygmy language. However, this split was only reconstructed as far as the 15th century.
The Baka Ngombe of Cameroon and Gabon speak closely related Ubangian languages of the Ngbaka branch: Baka proper, Ganzi, and Gundi Ngondi.
In the Central African Republic north of the Aka are a group who speak the language of their neighbors, Bofi, which is a language of the Gbaya branch.
The GyeleKola or Koya are the westernmost Pygmies, living in southern Cameroon near the coast, and in Equatorial Guinea on the coast. They speak two dialects of the Bantu Mvumbo language.
The KolaKoya of Congo and northwestern Gabon speak a Bantu language, Ngom.
The Mongo Twa or Ntomba Twa of Lake Tumba and Lake Mai-Ndombe of western D.R. Congo, speak several varieties of Mongo, which are either divergent dialects or closely related languages.
The Twa of Angola live among the Ngambwe, Havakona, Zimba and Himba, and presumably speak their languages.
Physically, these southern Twa do not differ from their Bantu neighbors, but have a similar subservient position to their agricultural neighbors as the forest Pygmies. They may be remnant Khoisan populations; the Ila, Tonga, and Lenje of Zambia, and the Chewa of Malawi, for example, believe them to be aboriginal peoples, and trace sacred places to them, but Blench suggests that they may have instead migrated from the forest with the Bantu, and were later conflated with aboriginal populations in legend. However, Roger Blench argues that the Pygmies are not descended from residual hunter-gatherer groups, but rather are offshoots of larger neighboring ethnolinguistic groups that had adopted forest subsistence strategies.
