Bantu Languages
A group of roughly 500 related languages spoken across Central, East and Southern Africa, including Swahili, Zulu, Shona and Lingala.
- Family
- Niger-Congo
- Languages
- About 500
- Widely spoken
- Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa, Shona, Lingala, Kikongo
The Bantu expansion
Starting from near today's Nigeria–Cameroon border several thousand years ago, Bantu-speaking communities spread south and east, carrying farming and later ironworking with them.
Noun classes
Bantu languages sort nouns into classes marked by prefixes. In Swahili, mtu means person and watu means people; the prefix changes and words that agree with the noun change with it.
Swahili
Swahili grew on the East African coast through centuries of Indian Ocean trade and is now a working language of the African Union.