Bantu languages by number of speakers


Bantu languages by number of speakers. 3 million Xhosa-speakers, the majority, live in the Eastern Cape , followed by the Western Cape (approximately 1 million), Gauteng (671,045), the Free State (246,192), KwaZulu-Natal (219,826), North West (214,461), Mpumalanga (46,553 Jan 30, 2019 · The Bantu Languages. Uganda is a multilingual country in East Africa. The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic, sometimes Afrasian ), also known as Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic, are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara and Sahel. Jan 18, 2024 · The Gabonese government sponsored research on the Bantu languages starting in the 1970s. There are forty living native languages in Uganda, which can be grouped into three main language families: Bantu, Central Sudanic, and Nilotic. Swahili, which is spoken by five million people as a mother tongue and some 30 million as a second language, is a Bantu lingua franca important in both commerce and literature. Although scholars debate the precise timing, motivation, and directions of these migrations, linguistic evidence and archaeological traces of Fewer than 10,000 are spread across the rest of the country—for a total number of Venda speakers in South Africa at 1. The country with the largest number of Bantu languages is Congo-Kinshasa. The results clearly support a scenario in which groups first moved south through the rainforest from a homeland somewhere near the Nigeria–Cameroon border. 1 million speakers in 2010. The Bantu language with the largest number of native speakers is Shona with 13. (. There are also Lingala speakers in Angola and in the Central African Republic. Feb 16, 2024 · The Pare language of Tanzania also goes by the names of Kipare, Asu, Casu, Chasu, Athu, and Chathu. The official languages of South Africa are 11 – Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, and isiZulu. The estimate Afrikaans’ speakers are 15 to 20 million people. Austronesian , Semitic , Indo-European [13,14] and the languages of island Melanesia . The total number of Bantu languages is uncertain. Status: official language in Malawi and Zambia. Furthermore, it is one of the most widely spoken languages among the Bantu languages, that takes the second position after Kiswahili in terms of the number of speakers who live in the region of Rwanda. It is mainly spoken by the Venda people or Vhavenḓa in the northern part of South Africa's Limpopo province, as well as by some Lemba people in South Africa. The African peoples of Kenya, who constitute virtually the entire population, are divided into three language groups: Bantu, Nilo-Saharan, and Afro-Asiatic. The Kikuyu, Kamba, Meru, and Nyika peoples occupy Download scientific diagram | Main languages of Zambia by number of speakers (Zambia Census, CSO 2010). Native Digo speakers number around 360,000. 56 million native speakers, who primarily inhabit the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Nevertheless, it is worth to note that the number of Bantu languages have to be considered as general but not absolute validity. May 7, 2024 · Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. Nov 28, 2023 · The Bantu branch of this language group in particular has a wide geographic spread. The majority of Tumbuka speakers live in Malawi. The area in which these languages are spoken stretches from Dakar, Senegal, at the Venḓa or Tshivenḓa is a Bantu language and an official language of South Africa and Zimbabwe. The Bantu languages came from the region of eastern Nigeria or Cameroon. [1] [2] Khoisan is defined as those languages that have click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. In the process, the Proto-Bantu-speaking settlers displaced, eliminated or absorbed pre-existing hunter-gatherer and pastoralist groups that they encountered. The Great Lakes Bantu languages, also known as Lacustrine Bantu and Bantu zone J, are a group of Bantu languages of East Africa. Grey: Trilingual Spanish, Portuguese and French speaking country ( Equatorial Guinea ). 1 million Great Lakes Bantu. 680. Group Guthrie code ISO code Languages Feb 20, 2022 · X (Twitter) LinkedIn. The most widely spoken Niger-Congo languages by native speakers are Yoruba, Igbo, Fula and Shona. Cameroon is a Francophone and Anglophone country, and in 2023, French is spoken by 11. Beginning around 1500BCE, members of the proto-Bantu language group migrated eastward and southward from West Africa, crossing vast swathes of the continent over hundreds of years. Around 85% of Africans speak one or more Niger-Congo languages. Nov 1, 2014 · Bantu language, Ur-Bantu, through an analysis of vocabulary and patterns in the phonology of Bantu languages. [1] Nov 29, 2023 · Bantu is a family of about 600 languages currently spoken by more than 350 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. (1999) have 542, Maho (forthcoming) has some 660, and Mann, Dalby et al. Lingala, Ngala, is a Bantu language that belongs to the Niger-Congo language family. mother-tongue speakers — appeared in print (Nabirye 2009). 17%). This is a family of hundreds of languages whose number of speakers is close to 220 millions. Asian languages. 2 million native speakers of Xhosa, and another 11 million second language speakers. Bantu languages. [1 Apr 19, 2024 · Swahili, also known by its local name Kiswahili, is a Bantu language originally spoken by the Swahili people, who are found primarily in Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique. With them, the Bantu brought new technologies and skills such as cultivating high-yield crops and iron Oct 29, 2020 · By Madison Moulton. [10] English remains the official language and is the major language of Aug 1, 2017 · Kinyarwanda is a Bantu ethnic language with more than 12 million speakers in various countries including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and Rwanda. Introduction to bantu languages. , 2019, 17–78, includes 555 items. It is peer to the few languages Apr 7, 2021 · The linguistic phylogeny is based on lexical data for 100 concepts in 69 Bantu varieties, 34 of them part of South-Eastern Bantu languages and 35 outgroup languages belonging to different major The most widely spoken Bantu language by number of speakers is Swahili, with 16 million native speakers and 80 million L2 speakers (2015). The number of current Swahili speakers, be they native or second-language speakers, is estimated to be over 200 million, with Tanzania known to have most of the native speakers. Kinyarwanda is an ethnic language spoken by the three Rwandan ethnic groups: the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa people. English was adopted during the country's Xhosa. I. According to the 2011 census there are about 8. the complex history of the expansion of Bantu speakers. [9] Jan 8, 2016 · 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. [8] The number of Swahili speakers, be they native or second-language speakers, is estimated to be over 200 million. Jul 7, 2013 · The structure of phylogenetic trees built using language data can be used to test between dispersal scenarios and have previously been used to study the history of a number of language groupings, e. H. It is the language of the Zulu people, with about 13. [1] [2] [3] The official language and most widely spoken lingua franca is English, [4] [5] which was the language of Colonial Nigeria. The Bantu languages number around 550, all spoken in the area between Cameroon, Kenya, and South Africa (see map). 1% in rural areas, respectively) Mozambique has 22 Bantu origin languages which are: Swahili, Makhuwa, Sena, Ndau, Tswa-Ronga Aug 16, 2022 · The Bantu language family. Digo. It is Bantu language from the Bantu/Nguni family of languages, and has speakers in Botswana and Mozambique. The latest list, in Van de Velde et al. g. It is thought that Lingala originated from Oct 10, 2017 · Of these, Tumbuka has the largest number of speakers (2. 4 million speakers. Bantu is a general term for over 400 different ethnic groups in Africa, from Cameroon, Southern Africa, Central Africa, to Eastern Africa, united by a common language family (the Bantu languages) and in many cases common customs. The three largest languages are Fang, Mbere, and Sira (Eshira), each with about 25–30% of the speakers. I have a pretty good understanding of Shona and it's somewhat similar to Chewa and Swahili (a few similar words and sentence Ethnic groups and languages. 7 million L2), and Shona, with about 11 million speakers (if Manyika and Ndau are included). ) Xhosa is a Bantu language spoken in South Africa, mainly in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Free State and Northern Cape. Red: English speaking regions and countries. They are residents of both Tanzania and Kenya. In early 2009, the first modern m onolingual dictionary of a Bantu language — by a mother tongue-speaker, and for. The Bantu Expansion – the migration of Bantu-speaking people across the African continent – is one of Ancient history’s largest migrations. According to Ethnologue, there are over 40 million L2 speakers, but only about 800,000 native speakers. The term ‘Bantu’ ( Bâ-ntu) was coined by W. Mar 20, 2024 · Niger-Congo languages, a family of languages of Africa, which in terms of the number of languages spoken, their geographic extent, and the number of speakers is by far the largest language family in Africa. Nigerian Pidgin – an English-based creole – is spoken by over 60 million people. The Bantu language family is a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu peoples in the southern half of Africa. 2 million people or just 2. Within Niger–Congo, the Bantu languages alone account for 350 million people (2015), or half the total Niger–Congo speaking population. Sesotho , Sepedi, and Tswana are very similar and I understand them if spoken slowly. When Bantu speakers did move into the rainforest Hausa is a member of the Afroasiatic language family [6] and is the most widely spoken language within the Chadic branch of that family. Map of Cameroon's official languages. 10 in Guthrie’s classification of Bantu languages . Most studies of Bantu languages in the 19th and early 20th centuries were merely The expansion of the Bantu speakers beyond that region and across other parts of sub-Saharan African likely began between 3000 and 2000 BCE and is referred to as the Bantu migrations (Figure 9. Apr 29, 2024 · Twelve Bantu languages are spoken by more than five million people, including Rundi, Rwanda, Shona, Xhosa, and Zulu. The six branches of Afro-Asiatic are Semitic, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Omotic, and Egyptian. They play a crucial role in the linguistic, cultural, and socio-political landscape of Sub-Saharan Africa. The 2017 national population and housing census found out that Portuguese is spoken by 47. 2007), which focuses on Bantu- specific morphological structures. Apr 19, 2024 · 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. References The Bantu languages dominate the southern half of the African land mass and are spoken as first languages by an estimated 220 million speakers, nearly a third of Africa’s total population. The total number of languages in this family ranges in the hundreds. The Nguni languages are a dialectic continuum so I understand Zim Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa and SiSwati at 80%+ intelligibility. The Apr 5, 2023 · Arrow colors correspond to north-western Bantu 2 (in brown), west-western Bantu (in green), south-western Bantu (in dark blue), and eastern Bantu speakers (in red). Historical Jan 1, 2010 · Abstract. 5. Due to increasing Angola-China relations, there is now a sinophone community of about 300,000. There are an estimated 450–550 Bantu languages, spoken by about 250 million speakers in 27 countries, from the Nigerian-Cameroonian borderland in the northwest of the Bantu-speaking area to Kenya in the northeast and to South Africa in the south (see Map 14. [9] It is the main lingua franca of the country and there are a growing number of sole English speakers due to rapid urbanisation and globalisation. This uncertainy can be seen by considering recent estimates of “Bantu language” numbers: Guthrie (1967–1971) names some 440 Bantu “varieties”, Grimes (2000) has 501, Bastin et al. As of 2003 [update] approximately 5. 1 (taken from Mpofu-Hamadziripi et al. The list of the Bantu languages in Nurse & Philippson, 2003, 639–51, notes only that it has some 200 more entries than Guthrie, 1971, where the count presumably exceeded the 241 of Guthrie, 1948. [20] An estimated 2,500–3,000 years ago (1000 BC to 500 BC), speakers of the Proto-Bantu language began a series of migrations eastward and southward, carrying agriculture with them. The word Bantu means “the people” and is made up of the stem -ntu (“person”) and the plural prefix ba -. in Featured. Languages of Nigeria. During the apartheid era of South Africa The word Bantu means “the people” and is made up of the stem -ntu (“person”) and the plural prefix ba -. One of their most important findings was that the Bantu languages can be divided into four genetic subgroups: the Mbam-Bubi, the North-Western, the Central-Western, and the South-Eastern. Swahili, also known by its local name Kiswahili, is a Bantu language originally spoken by the Swahili people, who are found primarily in Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique (along the East African coast and adjacent littoral islands). The Semitic branch has 78 languages, including Arabic, the first language of up to 300 million throughout North Africa and widely spoken in the Middle East. The large number of Bantu speakers is matched by the number of Bantu languages: estimates vary from more than 300 to nearly 700. It is estimated that some 300 to 350 million hard to state with accuracy the total of Bantu “languages”. 16 million, L2: 80 million, as of 2015) Other major Bantu languages include Zulu, with 27 million speakers (15. 1). [2] Over 500 million people are native speakers of an Afroasiatic Zulu ( / ˈzuːluː / ZOO-loo ), or isiZulu as an endonym, is a Southern Bantu language of the Nguni branch spoken and indigenous to Southern Africa. Blue: French speaking regions and countries. Tumbuka is a Bantu language that belongs to the Niger Congo language family and is in the same language group as the previously mentioned Nyanja. The loanwords date from the era of contact between Arab slave traders and the Bantu inhabitants of the east coast of Africa, which was also the time period when Swahili emerged as a lingua franca in the region. The most widely spoken by the Aug 8, 2012 · The major debate concerns the spatial and temporal dispersal of Bantu languages in Sub-Saharan Africa. [6] The number of current Swahili speakers, be they native or second-language speakers, is estimated to be over 200 The word Bantu means "the people" and is made up of the stem -ntu ( "person" ) and the plural prefix ba -. The Bantu languages form a subgroup of the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family. More than 250 Bantu languages exist by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though some accounts list 535 distinct languages. One hypothesis states that Bantu languages split at an early stage (approx. The Bantu linguistic group covers an area from South Cameroon to almost the whole Southern Africa, including then Eastern and Central Africa. The extinct Kwadi language may have been distantly related to Khoe, and Kwisi is entirely unknown; their speakers were neither Khoisan nor Bantu. Ethnologue estimated that it was spoken as a first language by some 54 million people and as a second language by another 34 million, bringing the total number of Hausa speakers to an estimated 88 million. 3 million speakers. It seems to me that a fair number of younger Bantuists (judged, for example, by recent theses) are interested in It is loosely based on the comparative study of morphosyntactic variation in Bantu languages (Marten et al. The Bantu language with the largest total number of speakers is Swahili . grea1289. (1987) have ca. Today, more than 240 million people speak one of the more than 500 Bantu languages. c, Spatial visualization of Jan 2, 2020 · Finally, calques and head-final nominal compounds in a number of these Bantu languages point to structural influence, most likely from Khwe. Writing system: Latin alphabet. 2013: 3): Aug 10, 2017 · The flag of Uganda. 6 million) and is also used in a wider range of countries, including Tanzania and Malawi. Aug 2, 2022 · The Bantu Expansion transformed sub-Saharan Africa's linguistic, economic, and cultural composition. A (very small) number of Angolans of Lebanese descent speak Arabic and/or French. dialect) at between 1,250 and 2,100, and by some counts at over 3,000. 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 Bantu contains hundreds of languages that are spoken by 120 million Africans in the Congo Basin, Angola, the Republic of South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Kenya. There are estimated to be between 440-680 distinct languages, but this can depend on the definition of a language versus a dialect Most Spoken Bantu Languages by Total Number of Speakers. 8 million speakers in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Botswana and Zambia. Bantu is by far the largest, and its speakers are mainly concentrated in the southern third of the country. Official Languages Of South Africa. 4. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to SIL Ethnologue), one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. It became a key part of Zimbabwe’s history in the early 19th century, when speakers migrated from KwaZulu, conquering the Shona and embedding their language in what is now Zimbabwe. Nurse and Philippson (2003) refer to an estimate of about 240 million speakers of Bantu languages - one in three Africans! Guthrie (1948) classified these into groups, indicated by a letter (geographical and partly genealogical The Bantu languages descend from a common Proto-Bantu language, which is believed to have been spoken in what is now Cameroon in Central Africa. Written by an international team of experts, this comprehensive volume presents grammatical analyses of individual Bantu languages, comparative studies of their main phonetic, phonological and grammatical characteristics and overview chapters on their history and classification. 91 million non-native speakers, per Ethnologue), and it’s been widely used as a trade language in The number of languages natively spoken in Africa is variously estimated (depending on the delineation of language vs. The Khoisan languages ( / ˈkɔɪsɑːn / KOY-sahn; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a number of African languages once classified together, originally by Joseph Greenberg. The best-known Bantu languages are named on Maps 1, 2, 3, and 4. It is the principle language of Zimbabwe, along with Ndebele and English. Mar 2, 2024 · English and Pidgin. Swahili is the mother tongue of the Swahili people (or Waswahili) who inhabit several large stretches of the Indian Ocean coastlines from southern Somalia as far south as Mozambique 's border region with Sep 27, 2020 · Bantu Migration: Background. How they spread throughout such a wide area has been the focus of much study and theorizing. This chapter considers the linguistic sociohistory of southern Africa, with particular attention to the Bantu languages. Zulu comes second with 10. Niger–Congo languages (Bantu and non-Bantu) Spoken in West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa and considered the largest language family spoken in West Africa. English is the single most widely spoken language in Nigeria, spoken by 60 million of the population. It is spoken by 20 million people worldwide. For much of the 20th century, they were thought Apr 11, 2019 · The Bantu Migration from their origins in southern West Africa saw a gradual population movement sweep through the central, eastern, and southern parts of the continent starting in the mid-2nd millennium BCE and finally ending before 1500 CE. First written: 1830s. Bleek in 1857 or 1858 (Silverstein 1993 [1968]), and popularised through his Nov 24, 2017 · Shona and some of its dialects are classified as S. 3% in the cities and 5. Shona? The Bantu expansion was [3] [4] [5] a major series of migrations of the original Proto-Bantu -speaking group, [6] [7] which spread from an original nucleus around West - Central Africa. The total number of Bantu languages is The Bantu language with the largest total number of speakers is Swahili; however, the majority of its speakers use it as a second language (L1: c. The primary evidence for this expansion has been linguistic, namely that the languages spoken in sub-Equatorial Africa are remarkably similar to each other. Aug 12, 2017 · Most speakers of Swahili speak it as a second language (it has 19 million native speakers vs. The Bantu language with the largest total number of speakers is Swahili; however, the majority of its speakers use it as a second language (L1: c. Proto-language. Jun 5, 2014 · Bantu speech communities expanded over large parts of sub-Saharan Africa within the last 4000–5000 years, reaching different parts of southern Africa 1200–2000 years ago. In Zambia Chichewa is spoken in the Central and Eastern provinces, and there were about 2. Eastern Cape has the highest number of Xhosa speakers at approximately 5 million people followed by Western Cape with over 1. 3% of all Mozambicans aged 5 and older, with native speakers making up 16. Following is a list of Bantu languages as interpreted by Harald Hammarström, and following the Guthrie classification. 4000 ya) north of the rainforest, from which the Western and Eastern Bantu languages are derived as two primary branches [4,6–9]. 9 ARABIC The Bantu language with the largest total number of speakers is Swahili; however, nearly all speakers know it as a second language. The most widely spoken by total number of speakers is Swahili. The three largest phyla of the Indo-European language family in Europe are Romance, Germanic, and Slavic; they have more than 200 million speakers each, and together account for close to 90% of Europeans. Proto-Great Lakes Bantu [1] Glottolog. In this detailed overview, we'll delve into the history, characteristics, and significance of the Bantu languages. Subgroups and important single languages of the Niger-Congo family of languages. 12 It yielded different possible genetic trees, depending on which statistical approach one chose from a set of ten alternatives. isiXhosa. The remainder of the languages (including Teke, Vili, Punu, Myene and Kota) are single-digit percentages, and some have only a few thousand speakers. Mbóte – Hello. Among the world’s languages, Arabic ranks fourth in the number of speakers. The Bantu languages subdivide in several major branches, with languages belonging to the Eastern and Western Bantu branches spreading over large parts of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. Recognised minority language in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Here are the 10 most commonly spoken Bantu languages. Lingala Language. The Tshivenda language is related to the Kalanga language which is spoken in Southern Africa. Estimates of the number of Shona speakers per dialect are given in Table 15. Includes the languages: Swahili, Zulu, Fula, Yoruba, Igbo, Ashanti and Ewe language. The most important is Swahili (see Swahili language ), spoken as a first language by more than 30 million people, chiefly in Kenya, Tanzania, Congo (Kinshasa), and Uganda. The most widely spoken Niger–Congo languages by number of native speakers are Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, Lingala, Ewe, Fon, Ga-Dangme, Shona, Sesotho, Xhosa, Zulu, Akan, and Mooré. This includes parameters such as symmetric/asymmetric object marking and locative inversion, which is typical for a number of Bantu languages. 7 million (41. 2% of South Africa's population, making Venda speakers the second smallest minority language in South Africa, after the Ndebele language, which number 1. Once just an obscure island dialect of an African Bantu tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa’s most internationally recognised language. Swahili is a Bantu language, but in Kenya, it's a second language to most, whereas the Kikuyu, Oluluhyia and Kamba languages are among the most common first languages of the Bantu group. To say hello in Shona, one says “Mhoro”. Scholars disagree as to whether these are all distinct languages or whether many are simply dialects of major Bantu tongues. They were recognized as a group by the Tervuren team, who posited them as an additional zone (zone J) to Guthrie's largely geographic A common part of many Niger-Congo languages is the use of a noun class system. speakers of a Bantu language; seven authors are from a North American university, three from the (American-based) organization SIL, thirteen from Europe, and quite a number are retired. Languages with at least 50 million first-language speakers; Language Native speakers (in millions) Language family Branch Mandarin Chinese: 941 Sino-Tibetan: Sinitic: Spanish: 486 Indo-European: Romance: English: 380 Indo-European: Germanic: Hindi: 345 Indo-European: Indo-Aryan: Bengali: 237 Indo-European: Indo-Aryan: Portuguese: 236 Indo Dec 2, 2023 · With over 300 million speakers (5% of the global population) spanning a region of sub-Saharan Africa of 10 million km 2, the Bantu languages represent one of the world’s largest language groups. The Bantu languages represent one of the most widespread and diverse subfamilies of the Niger-Congo language family. 8 million of Kinyarwanda speakers reside in Rwanda. It is spoken in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in the Republic of the Congo. The assumption these approaches make is that the The Bantu language with the largest total number of speakers is Swahili; however, the majority of its speakers use it as a second language (L1: c. Makua had about six million speakers in the late 20th century, and Lomwe two million. 600 Bantu languages. Mar 19, 2024 · A Bantu language descended from Zulu (85% of the two languages’ lexicon is shared), Ndebele is today spoken mainly in western Zimbabwe, in Matabeleland province. Jan 10, 2019 · It is the most widely distributed language in South Africa and the second-most widely spoken language in the country. I am aware that Swahili is the most widely spoken Bantu language in terms of total speakers, as it has somewhere between 120 and 150 million speakers, but I was wondering what are some of the languages fall after it. from publication: Translanguaging spaces and multilingual public writing in Zambia: tracing Shona is the most spoken language in Zimbabwe, with over 10 million speakers in a population of over 14 million. 8 million people out of 28. Bantu Languages: An In-Depth Overview 1. 13). 6% [2] of the population (38. The majority of the Xhosa speakers also speak Zulu, English, or Afrikaans. Two additional languages spoken in the country come from the Kuliak language family. . The second largest group of languages is the Nilotic group which consists of languages spoken by 31% of the Kenyan population. There is still debate Dec 7, 2020 · The overall number of languages varies from 440 to 680 different languages, depending on the definition “language or dialect” There are hundreds of millions of speakers, which hit about 350 million in the middle of the 2010s (roughly 30 percent of the population of Africa, or roughly 5 percent of the total world population). It is a Bantu language group tongue that is spoken by the Pare people in the northeast of Tanzania. Swahili has more total speakers than any other Niger-Congo language, while Yoruba has the greatest number of native speakers out of any language in the Niger-Congo family. Benue-Congo languages, the largest branch It is the second most common Bantu home language in South Africa as a whole. Spoken in: Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Eswatini and Bostwana. It is also in parts of Lesotho and Zimbabwe. Romani Swahili (also called Kiswahili; see below for derivation) is a Bantu language of the Sabaki subgroup of Northeastern Coast Bantu languages. We analysed the genetic Main Phonetic Features of Some Bantu Languages and Their Implications for English Pronunciation This section is devoted to bringing some segmental characteristics of a number of Bantu languages, namely, Kikuyu1, Kimbundu2, Umbundu3, Kiembu4, and others. There are over 525 native languages spoken in Nigeria. The Bantu expansion is the name for a postulated millennia-long series of migrations of speakers of the original proto-Bantu language group. The group of Bantu languages is made up of about 500 languages of the Bantoid subgroup of the Bueno-Kongo branch of the Niger-Congo language family. Jul 7, 2013 · Here, we build phylogenetic trees of Bantu languages and map them onto geographical space in order to assess the likely pathway of expansion and test between dispersal scenarios. Makua language, a Bantu language that is closely related to Lomwe and is spoken in northern Mozambique. Sep 29, 2022 · September 29, 2022. Among them, the major 3 are isiZulu with more than 22% speakers, isiXhosa with about 16% of South African speakers Some 250 million people speak one or more of the Bantu languages as mother tongues today. In Rwanda, Kinyarwanda is an official language and the only ethnic language. jn zg ya oc dv en eg no ga dm