Bantu languages

The Bantu languages (English: UK: /ˌbænˈtuː/, US: /ˈbæntuː/ Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a language family of 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.

The total number of Bantu speakers is estimated to be around 350 million in 2015 (roughly 30% of the population of Africa or 5% of the world population). Bantu languages are largely spoken southeast of Cameroon, and throughout Central, Southern, Eastern, and Southeast Africa. About one-sixth of Bantu speakers, and one-third of Bantu languages, are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The most widely spoken Bantu language by number of speakers is Swahili, with 16 million native speakers and 80 million L2 speakers (2015). Most native speakers of Swahili live in Tanzania, where it is a national language, while as a second language, it is taught as a mandatory subject in many schools in East Africa, and is a lingua franca of the East African Community.

Other major Bantu languages include Lingala with more than 20 million speakers (Congo, DRC), followed by Zulu with 13.56 million speakers (South Africa), Xhosa, with 8.2 million speakers (South Africa and Zimbabwe), and Shona with less than 10 million speakers (if Manyika and Ndau are included), while Sotho-Tswana languages (Sotho, Tswana and Pedi) have more than 15 million speakers (across Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, and Zambia). Zimbabwe has Kalanga, Matebele, Nambya, and Xhosa speakers. Ethnologue separates the largely mutually intelligible Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, which together have 20 million speakers.

The similarity among dispersed Bantu languages had been observed as early as the 17th century. The term Bantu as a name for the group was not coined but "noticed" or "identified" (as Bâ-ntu) by Wilhelm Bleek as the first European in 1857 or 1858, and popularized in his Comparative Grammar of 1862. He noticed the term 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. Xhosa umntu "person", abantu "people"; Zulu umuntu "person", abantu "people").

There is no native term for the people who speak Bantu languages because they are not an ethnic group. People speaking Bantu languages refer to their languages by ethnic endonyms, which did not have an indigenous concept prior to European contact for the larger ethnolinguistic phylum named by 19th-century European linguists. Bleek's identification was inspired by the anthropological observation of groups frequently self-identifying as "people" or "the true people" (as is the case, for example, with the term Khoikhoi, but this is a kare "praise address" and not an ethnic name).

The term narrow Bantu, excluding those languages classified as Bantoid by Malcolm Guthrie (1948), was introduced in the 1960s.