Bantu
Sign in to savelarge language family spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa
AI overview
Bantu is a large family of related languages spoken across Sub-Saharan Africa by hundreds of millions of people. Understanding Bantu languages matters because they represent the linguistic heritage of a vast region and help us understand the history, culture, and connections among African peoples.
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Article
The Bantu languages ( UK: /ˌbænˈtuː/, US: /ˈbæntuː/ Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a language family, or a branch of the proposed Niger-Congo language family, containing about 600 languages that are spoken by the Bantu peoples of Central, Southern, Eastern and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages.
The total number of Bantu languages is estimated at between 440 and 680 distinct languages, depending on the definition of "language" versus "dialect". Many Bantu languages borrow words from each other, and some are mutually intelligible. Some of the languages are spoken by a very small number of people; for example, the Kabwa language was estimated in 2007 to be spoken by only 8,500 people, but was assessed to be a distinct language.