Malcolm Guthrie

Guthrie was a foremost professor of Bantu languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. He is known primarily for his classification of Bantu languages, Guthrie 1971. The classification, though based more on geography than linguistic relatedness, is nonetheless the most widely used. Together with the Belgian linguist Achille Émile Meeussen (1912–1978), he is regarded as one of the two leading Bantu specialists of the second half of the 20th century.

Early life and career

Malcolm Guthrie was born in Hove, Sussex, England, the son of a Scottish father and a mother of Dutch extraction. After schooling at Ipswich, he took a degree in metallurgy at Imperial College, London.

Shortly afterwards, however, he felt called to the Baptist ministry. He served for two years as minister of a Baptist church in Rochester, during which time he married Margaret Near, the daughter of a Baptist minister at a neighbouring church. In 1932 he went as a missionary to Kinshasa in the then Belgian Congo, where he worked for the next eight years. It was here that he studied the Lingala language and several other local languages.