the van two languages technically the
narrow Bantu languages constitute a
traditional 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 Bantu languages are spoken
largely east and south of present-day
Cameroon that is in the regions commonly
known as Central Africa South East
Africa and southern Africa parts of the
van to area include languages from other
language families the Bantu language
with the largest total number of
speakers is Swahili however the majority
of his speakers know it as a second
language according to ethnologue there
are over 180 million l2 speakers but
only about 45 million native speakers
according to ethnologue Shona is the
most widely spoken as a first language
with 10.8 million speakers followed
closely by Zulu with 10.3 million
ethnologue separates the largely
mutually intelligible Kinyarwanda and
carrandi but if grouped together they
have 12 point 4 million speakers
estimates of number of speakers of most
languages vary widely due both to the
lack of accurate statistics in most
developing countries and the difficulty
in defining exactly where the boundaries
of a language lie particularly in the
presence of a dialect continuum origin
the Bantu languages descend from a
common proto Bantu language which is
believed to have been spoken in what is
now Cameroon in West Africa an estimated
2,500 the euro 3,000 years ago although
other sources put the start of the Bantu
expansion closer to 3,000 BC speakers of
the proto Bantu language began a series
of migrations eastward and southward
carrying agriculture with them this band
- expansion came to dominate sub-saharan
Africa east of Cameroon an area where
Bantu people's now constitute nearly the
entire population the
technical term Bantu meaning human
beings or simply people was first used
by Wilhelm bleak as this is reflected in
many of the languages of this group a
common characteristic of Bantu languages
is that they use words such as Mun - or
muta for human being or in simplistic
terms person and the plural prefix for
human nouns starting with mu in most
languages is Bar thus giving Bantu for
people bleak and later Karl may Hoff
pursued extensive studies comparing the
grammatical structures of Bantu
languages classification the term narrow
Bantu was coined by the Bannu II euro
Congo working group to distinguish Bantu
as recognized by Malcolm Guthrie in his
seminal 1948 classification of the Bantu
languages from the bein toid languages
not recognized as Bantu by Guthrie in
recent times the distinctiveness of
narrow Bantu as opposed to the other
southern bein toid groups has been
called into doubt but the term is still
widely used a coherent classification of
narrow Bantu will likely need to exclude
many of the zone' and perhaps Zone B
languages there is no true genealogical
classification of the Bantu languages
most attempted classifications are
problematic in that they consider only
languages which happen to fall within
traditional narrow bantu rather than
South bein toid which has been
established as a unit by the comparative
method the most widely used
classification the alpha numeric coding
system developed by Guthrie is mainly
Geographic at a broader level the family
is commonly split into depending on the
reflexes of proto Bantu tone patterns
many Bancha ists grouped together parts
of zones a through D as northwest Bantu
or forest Bantu and the remainder is
central Bantu or savanna Bantu the two
groups have been described as having
mirror image tone systems where
northwest Bantu has a high tone in a
cognate central Bantu languages
generally have a low tone and vice-versa
northwest Bantu is more divergent
internally than central Bantu and
perhaps less conservative due to contact
with non Bantu nigeria euro Congo
languages
central Bantu is likely the innovative
line cladistic Lee Northwest Bantu is
clearly not a coherent family but even
for central Bantu the evidence is
lexical with little evidence that it is
a historically valid group the only
attempt at a detailed genetic
classification to replace the Guthrie
system is the 1999 tervuren proposal of
basedon Coopers and man however it
relies on lexico statistics which
because of its reliance on similarity
rather than shared innovations may
predict spurious groups of conservative
languages which are not closely related
meanwhile ethnologue has added languages
to the Guthrie classification that
Guthrie overlooked while removing them
bomb languages and shifting some
languages between groups in an apparent
effort at a semi genetic or at least
semi areal classification this has been
criticized for sowing confusion in one
of the few unambiguous ways to
distinguish Bantu languages nurse and
philipson evaluate many proposals for
low level groups of Bantu languages but
the result is not a complete portrayal
of the family glottal OGG has
incorporated many of these into their
classification nonetheless some version
of zone s does appear to be a coherent
group the languages which shared Al's
law may also form a valid group
northeast Bantu the infobox at right
lists these together with various
low-level groups that are fairly
uncontroversial though they continue to
be revised the development of a rigorous
genealogical classification of many
branches of Niger Congo not just Bantu
is hampered by insufficient data
language structure Guthrie reconstructed
both the phonemic inventory and the core
vocabulary of proto Bantu the most
prominent grammatical characteristic of
Bantu languages is the extensive use of
affixes
each noun belongs to a class and each
language may have several numbered
classes somewhat like genders in
European languages the class is
indicated by a prefix that is part of
the noun as well as agreement markers on
verb and qualifications connect
with the noun plural is indicated by a
change of class with a resulting change
of prefix the verb has a number of
prefixes though in the Western languages
these are often treated as independent
words in Swahili for example
mtoto mdo GOM eka sama means the small
child has read it a book mtoto child
governs the adjective prefix M and the
verb subject prefix a then comes perfect
tense me and an object marker key
agreeing with implicit key taboo book
pluralizing to children gives Watoto
wada go where mecha soma and pluralizing
two books gives Watoto wada go way move
a soma Bantu words are typically made up
of open syllables of the type CV with
most languages having syllables
exclusively of this type the Bouchon
language recorded by fan Sina however
has final consonants while slurring of
the final syllable is reported as common
among the Tonga of Malawi the
morphological shape of Bantu words is
typically CV v cv cv cv v cv cv etc that
is any combination of cv in other words
a strong claim for this language family
is that almost all words end in a vowel
precisely because closed syllables are
not permissible in most of the
documented languages as far as is
understood this tendency to avoid
consonant clusters in some positions is
important when words are imported from
English or other non Bantu languages an
example from chewer the word school
borrowed from English and then
transformed to fit the sound patterns of
this language is so cool ooh that is sk
has been broken up by inserting in the
pen thetag u u has also been added at
the end of the word another example is
bulla D for bread similar effects are
seen in loanwords for other non-african
cv languages like Japanese however a
clustering of sounds at the beginning of
a syllable can be readily observed in
such languages as Shona and the Makua
variants equals re duplication equals re
duplication is a common morphological
phenomenon in Bantu languages
is usually used to indicate frequency or
intensity of the action signaled by the
verb stem example in Swahili pica means
strike pig a beggar means strike
repeatedly well-known words and names
that have reduplicated include Bafana
Bafana a football team Chippewa Paulo a
football team
Erick Djemba Djemba a footballer Lamanna
luluwa a footballer M Goran Goro a
conservation area repetition emphasizes
the repeated word in the context that it
is used for instance when der Poel
Hajduk a while
pole pole diem when dough has to to
emphasize the consistency of slowness of
the pace the meaning of the former in
translation is he who goes slowly
doesn't trip and that of the latter is a
slow but steady pace wins the race
Haraka Haraka would mean hurrying just
for the sake of hurrying reckless Harry
as in NJ oo Haraka Haraka come here
Harry Harry
on the contrary to the above definition
there are some words in some of the
languages in which reduplicating has the
opposite meaning it usually denotes
short durations and/or lower intensity
of the action and also means a few
repetitions or a little bit more example
one exit Tsonga and related famines to
walk while Pham the fam'ly means to walk
around example 2 in is a Zulu and see
Swati hambar means go hambo humba means
go go meaning go a little bit but not
much
example 3 in both of the above languages
Shia means strike chaser means strike
strike meaning strike a few more times
lightly but not heavy strikes and not
too many times example 4 in exit Tsonga
hosaka so means chaos hasser does not
have a meaning equals noun class equals
here is an ongoing list of nominal
classes in Bantu notable Bantu languages
following are the principal Bantu
languages of each country included are
those languages that constitute at least
1% of the population and have at least
10% the number of speakers of the
largest Bantu
language in the country most languages
are best known in English without the
class prefix but are sometimes seen with
the prefix in a few cases prefixes are
used to distinguish languages with the
same root in their name such as Chiluba
and Cuba
oome bundu and Kim Boone do the barre
form typically does not occur in the
language itself but is the basis for
other words based on the ethnicity so in
the country of Botswana the people are
the bats Juana one person is a mots
Juana and the language is setswana and
in Uganda centred on the kingdom of Boog
on de the dominant ethnicity of the
Buganda
whose language is Luganda this list is
incomplete an attempt at a full list of
Bantu languages was found in the Bantu
languages of Africa 1959 geographic
areas Bantu words popularized in Western
cultures some words from various Bantu
languages have been borrowed into
Western languages these include bomba
bongos Bwana can doom chimpanzee conga
goobers gumbo Hakuna Matata
Impala in dhaba Jenga jumbo kalimba
Kwanzaa Mamba Mambo Myra marimba rumba
safari samba simba Ubuntu a case has
been made out for borrowings of many
place names and even misremembered
rhymes a euro chiefly from one of the
Luba varieties a euro in the USA writing
systems along with the Latin script and
Arabic script orthographies there are
also some modern indigenous writing
systems used for bantu languages then
Wang we go alphabet is an abugida that
is used to write the chewer language and
other languages of Malawi the man doom
script is an abugida that is used to
write the bantu languages of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo mainly
by the kam Bankwest movement is a BEC
solemn vow is a featural syllabary that
is used to write southern Bantu
languages see also Bantu people's mere
yusin's rule in goony languages noun
class
references bibliography Biddulph Joseph
Bantu byways ponta prete 2001 ISBN 978
1-800 97,000 999 - 30 - 1 Fink
Franz Nikolaus die by want shaft svaha
currency lot nice turbine - sprechen
Vanden her Kundra pricked
retrieved August 25 2012 Guthrie Malcolm
1948 the classification of the Bantu
languages London Oxford University Press
for the International African Institute
Guthrie Malcolm 1971 comparative Bantu
fall to Farnborough Gregg International
Heine bond
seventy-three sergeant ish glider under
Bantu Sprachen Africa and Alba c-56 164
185 Maho Johnny F 2001 the Bantu area ms
africa and asia 140 euro 49 mewho johnny
f2000 to ban to line up comparative
overview of three Bantu classifications
gah paragraph two borg university
department of Oriental and African
languages nurse Derek and Garr copyright
rod Phillips in 2006 the Bantu languages
routledge
Piron pascal 1995 identification lexico
statistic des groupes bento des stables
Journal of West African languages 25 to
3 euro 39 Stanford kiswahili retrieved
June 20 2013 external links comparative
Bantu online dictionary a euro includes
a comprehensive bibliography Maho 2009
guthrie 1948 in detail with subsequent
Corrections and corresponding ISO codes
Bantu online resources by Jackie maniaci
including lists of Bantu noun classes
with reconstructed proto Bantu prefixes
Eretz compilation of classifications by
Klieman based on himself and others
Contini Moravia ellen noun
classification in swahili 1994 list of
Bantu language names with synonyms
ordered by Guthrie number introduction
to the languages of South Africa Journal
of West African languages narrow Bantu
Bantu languages of Uganda