Bantu languages

The Bantu languages (English: /ˈbæntuː/, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) technically the Narrow Bantu languages, as opposed to 'Wide Bantu', a loosely defined categorisation which includes other 'Bantoid' languages, are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu peoples throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.Lingua francaMozambique The Bantu languages (English: /ˈbæntuː/, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) technically the Narrow Bantu languages, as opposed to 'Wide Bantu', a loosely defined categorisation which includes other 'Bantoid' languages, are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu peoples throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. As part of the Southern Bantoid group, they are part of the Benue-Congo language family, which in turn is part of the large Niger–Congo phylum. The total number of Bantu languages ranges in the hundreds, depending on the definition of 'language' versus 'dialect', and is estimated at between 440 and 680 distinct languages.The total number of Bantu speakers is in the hundreds of millions, estimated around 350 million in the mid-2010s (roughly 30% of the total population of Africa, or roughly 5% of world population).Bantu languages are largely spoken east and south of Cameroon, throughout Central Africa, Southeast Africa and Southern Africa. About one sixth of the Bantu speakers, and about one third of Bantu languages, are found in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone (c. 60 million speakers as of 2015). See list of Bantu peoples. The Bantu language with the largest total number of speakers is Swahili; however, the majority of its speakers use it as a second language (L1: c. 16 million, L2: 80 million, as of 2015). Other major Bantu languages include Zulu, with 27 million speakers (15.7 million L2), and Shona, with about 11 million speakers (if Manyika and Ndau are included). Ethnologue separates the largely mutually intelligible Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, which, if grouped together, have 12.4 million speakers. The similarity between dispersed Bantu languages had been observed as early as in the 17th century.The term 'Bantu' as a name or the group was coined (as Bâ-ntu) by Wilhelm Bleek in 1857 or 1858, and popularised in his Comparative Grammar of 1862.The name was coined to represent the word for 'people' in loosely reconstructed Proto-Bantu, from the plural noun class prefix *ba- categorizing 'people', and the root *ntʊ̀ - 'some (entity), any' (e.g. Zulu umuntu 'person', abantu 'people').There is no native term for the group, as Bantu populations refer to themselves by their tribal endonyms but did not have a concept for the larger ethno-linguistic phylum. Bleek's coinage was inspired by the anthropological observation of groups self-identifying as 'people' or 'the true people' (as is indeed the case, for example, with the Khoikhoi of South Africa). The term 'narrow Bantu', excluding those languages classified as Bantoid by Guthrie (1948), was introduced in the 1960s. The prefix ba- in Bantu specifically refers to people, not language. In Bantu itself, the term for languages is formed with the ki- noun class (Nguni ísi-), as in Kiswahili 'coast-language' and isiZulu 'Zulu language'. Apparently inspired by this pattern, there was a suggestion in South Africa to refer to Bantu languages as 'Kintu' in the 1980s.The suggestion was immediately abandoned. Not only does the word kintu exist, meaning 'thing' with no relation to the concept of 'language', it was also reported by delegates at the African Languages Association of Southern Africa conference in 1984 that in some Bantu languages, the term 'Kintu' has a derogatory significance, that is, kintu refers to 'things' and is used as a dehumanizing term of people who have lost their dignity.In addition, Kintu is a figure in some Bantu mythologies.The term 'Kintu' apparently still saw occasional use in the 1990s in South Africa. The Bantu languages descend from a common Proto-Bantu language, which is believed to have been spoken in what is now Cameroon in Central Africa. An estimated 2,500–3,000 years ago (1000 BC to 500 BC), although other sources put the start of the Bantu Expansion closer to 3000 BC, speakers of the Proto-Bantu language began a series of migrations eastward and southward, carrying agriculture with them. This Bantu expansion came to dominate Sub-Saharan Africa east of Cameroon, an area where Bantu peoples now constitute nearly the entire population.