Malcolm Guthrie professor of Bantu languages, is known primarily for his classification of Bantu languages (Guthrie 1971). The classification, though based more on geography than relatedness, is nonetheless the most widely used.

Malcolm Guthrie was born in Hove

Hove

Hove is a town on the south coast of England, immediately to the west of its larger neighbour Brighton, with which it forms the unitary authority Brighton and Hove. It forms a single conurbation together with Brighton and some smaller towns and villages running along the coast...

, Sussex

Sussex

Sussex , from the Old English Sūþsēaxe , is an historic county in South East England corresponding roughly in area to the ancient Kingdom of Sussex. It is bounded on the north by Surrey, east by Kent, south by the English Channel, and west by Hampshire, and is divided for local government into West...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, the son of a Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 father and Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 mother.

The magnum opus of Guthrie is Comparative Bantu which appeared in 4 volumes published in 1967 (volume 1), 1970 (volumes 3 and 4), and 1971 (volume 2). The 4 volumes provide not only a genetic classification but also a reconstruction of Proto-Bantu as the Proto-language

Proto-language

A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...

 of the Bantu language family

Bantu languages

The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...

. For his reconstruction, Guthrie drew data from 28 so-called 'test languages' that were picked more or less randomly. It has been argued, for example by Wilhelm Möhlig, that this renders his reconstruction unreliable, since the reconstructed forms, and hence the genetic tree, would be different if one changes the selection of languages.

Guthrie also published extensively on a wide range of Bantu languages, including Lingala

Lingala language

Lingala, or Ngala, is a Bantu language spoken throughout the northwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a large part of the Republic of the Congo , as well as to some degree in Angola and the Central African Republic. It has over 10 million speakers...

, Bemba

Bemba language

The Bemba language, ChiBemba , is a major Bantu language spoken primarily in north-eastern Zambia by the Bemba people and as a lingua franca by about 18 related ethnic groups, including the Bisa people of Mpika and Lake Bangweulu, and to a lesser extent in Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the...

, Mfinu, and Teke.