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syllable structure which results from a reduplicative process in Banda, and provides
cognate percentages for each pair of languages.
His analysis leads him to reject the Peripheral Banda node, since each grouping
underneath the node is as distant phonologically and lexicostatistically from each other as
from Central Banda. Thus, he elevates South Central, Southern, Southwestern, and West
Central to the level of immediate constituents of the Banda node. In addition, he notes
that Yangere is more closely related to the Central Core than the other peripheral groups,
and so he posits an intermediate node to account for that level of relatedness.
On the other hand, Cloarec-Heiss (1997) argues for the Peripheral Banda node, on
the grounds that morphological rates of similarity between these speech varieties is high,
in fact, higher than lexical rates of similarity. However, she bases this on rates of
similarity rather than on a reconstructed morphology or definable shared morphological
innovations. Further research is necessary to substantiate her claim.
The internal classification of the Central Core of Banda as shown in Table 1.1 is
from Cloarec-Heiss (1986, 1988). However, as mentioned before, she does not explicitly
lay out her analysis, so it remains unclear exactly how she arrives at this internal
classification. Also, Olson (1996) does not make any claims regarding the internal
classification of the Central Core.
Cloarec-Heiss (1978), Fultz & Morgan (1986), and Olson (1996) each provide
lexicostatistical data comparing some of the Central Core languages. Unfortunately, none
of these studies contain languages from all six subgroups. Olson (p. 275) compares
languages within four of the subgroups: Banda-Bambari, Banda-Ndélé, Mid-Southern,
and Togbo-Vara. For his data, the pairs of languages which are putatively part of the
same subgroup consistently (with one exception) score higher than 90%. However, this is
not exclusively so, so his results are inconclusive. A comprehensive lexicostatistical
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