Bantu people
family of ethnolinguistic groups in Africa
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The Bantu people are a large family of ethnolinguistic groups spread across Africa who share related languages and cultural connections. They matter because they represent one of the world's most significant population groups, shaping the history, culture, and languages of much of sub-Saharan Africa.
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The Bantu peoples are an ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct Indigenous African ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages. The languages are native to countries spread over a vast area from West Africa, to Central Africa, Southeast Africa, East Africa and into Southern Africa. Bantu people also inhabit southern areas of Northeast African states.
There are several hundred Bantu languages. Depending on the definition of "language" or "dialect", it is estimated that there are between 440 and 680 distinct languages. The total number of speakers is in the hundreds of millions, ranging at roughly 350 million in the mid-2010s (roughly 30% of the population of Africa, or roughly 5% of the total world population). About 90 million speakers (2015), divided into some 400 ethnic or tribal groups, are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone.