Bantu Languages - while most linguists agree that the Bantu languages are related to the West African language group, there is a great deal of debate about how closely they are related and about when the Bantu languages separated. The Bantu languages are a large family of languages spoken primarily in the Southern part of Africa.
Get exclusive access to content from our 1768 First Edition with your subscription. Archaeologists are divided over whether all these cultural and economic attributes arrived with a single group of new immigrants speaking... Archaeologists are divided over whether all these cultural and economic attributes arrived with a single group of new immigrants speaking a new language or resulted from a more piecemeal development of different skills and the adoption of new techniques by indigenous hunter-gatherers, as…
They probably share similar words and linguistic structure, but people who speak different Romance languages don't automatically understand each other.
I suppose it makes sense, because the languages evolved in the same geographic area.
These languages also reveal a great deal about the cultures that they are spoken in, since people preserve their history and beliefs in their spoken language.Visitors to Africa may struggle with the Bantu languages, since there are so many of them … …divided into three language groups: Bantu, Nilo-Saharan, and Afro-Asiatic. If I understand correctly, I imagine Bantu languages are similar to the Romance languages (French, Italian, and Spanish.) More than 240 million people speak Bantu languages across Central, East, and Southern Africa but the exact number of languages differs according to who’s counting. Get kids back-to-school ready with Expedition: Learn! In English, vowels aren't always broken up by consonants, but it sounds like in Bantu they usually are. And it does make sense to use that word to classify the languages together!
It sounds like the same thing is true of the Bantu languages. This variety is a reflection of the country's diverse population that includes most major ethnoracial and linguistic groups found in Africa (see Languages of Africa)..
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Executive Director, Summer Institute of Linguistics Ltd., High Wycombe, England.
More than 250 Bantu languages exist by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though some accounts list 535 distinct languages.
Editor of These languages also reveal a great deal about the cultures that they are spoken in, since people preserve their history and beliefs in their @KaBoom - Reading about the Bantu languages reminded me of Romance languages also! History at your fingertips
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.
It's interesting that the languages in the Bantu language family all use the same word to refer to people.
Clear answers for common questions Bantu peoples, the approximately 85 million speakers of the more than 500 distinct languages of the Bantu subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family, occupying almost the entire southern projection of the African continent.
The prefix “ba” is a plural form of people, and “-ntu” or “-tu” is a suffix which also means “people.” Many of these languages use the word “Bantu” to refer to people, and this commonality is recognized in the naming of this language group.These languages are part of a larger linguistic group classified as Bantoid languages; Bantoid languages are, in turn, in the Niger-Congo group of African languages, which are spoken widely in much of Africa. I bet a linguistic analysis of English and Bantu would probably show that Bantu languages use a lot more vowels than English does. According to Ethnologue, there are a total of 68 languages spoken in Kenya.
By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica.Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Bantu is by far the largest, and its speakers are mainly concentrated in the southern third of the country.
Over 500 languages are classified in this family, including The “Bantu” in Bantu languages refers to a common linguistic trend which can be found in many of the languages in this family.
As is the case with many language families, there are many similarities in Bantu languages which allow linguists to trace historical shifts.
The word Bantu for the language families and its speakers is an artificial term based on the reconstructed Proto-Bantu term for "people" or "humans".
The Bantu languages are spoken in a very large area, including most of Africa from southern Cameroon eastward to Kenya and southward to the southernmost tip of the continent.
The Kikuyu, Kamba, Meru, and Nyika peoples occupy the fertile Central Rift highlands, while the Luhya…
Clear answers for common questions
Zulu umuntu "person", abantu "people", into "thing", iz… I wonder if Bantu languages are the same way?