A common characteristic of Bantu languages is that they use words such as muntu or mutu for "human being" or in simplistic terms "person", and the plural prefix for human nouns starting with mu- (class 1) in most languages is ba- (class 2), thus giving bantu for "people". Archaeologists are divided over whether all these cultural and economic attributes arrived with a single group of new immigrants speaking... Get exclusive access to content from our 1768 First Edition with your subscription. So, in the country of Botswana the people are the Batswana, one person is a Motswana, and the language is Setswana; and in Uganda, centred on the kingdom of Buganda, the dominant ethnicity are the Baganda (sg. [38] 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. Until recently[when?] Whiteley, P.M., Ming Xue, Wheeler, W.C. 2018. [13] In addition, delegates at the African Languages Association of Southern Africa conference in 1984 reported that, in some places, the term Kintu has a derogatory significance. [17] But in contemporary decolonial South African linguistics, the term Ntu languages is used. Hurry, hurry]. Piron 1995, Williamson & Blench 2000, Blench 2011), but the term is still widely used. Comparison of MP and Bayesian Bantu Trees (Chp. TOTAL OFFICIAL INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE SPEAKERS: 36,150,824 (69.83%[39]), Map 1 shows Bantu languages in Africa and map 2 a magnification of the Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon area, as of July 2017. [16], In the 1990s, the term Kintu was still occasionally used by South African linguists. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. (2015),[26] Rexova et al. The bare (prefixless) form typically does not occur in the language itself, but is the basis for other words based on the ethnicity. The Bantu languages (English: /ˈbæntuː/, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu peoples throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Executive Director, Summer Institute of Linguistics Ltd., High Wycombe, England. Cladistic analysis of Bantu languages: a new tree based on combined lexical and grammatical data. 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. Reduplication is a common morphological phenomenon in Bantu languages and is usually used to indicate frequency or intensity of the action signalled by the (unreduplicated) verb stem.[34]. How to use a word that (literally) drives some pe... Name that government! ), The Guthrie, Tervuren, and SIL lists are compared side by side in. Holden, C., Meade, A., Pagel, M. 2016. It is mainly geographic. Accessed 12 Oct. 2020. In contrast, there are some words in some of the languages in which reduplication has the opposite meaning. In a few cases prefixes are used to distinguish languages with the same root in their name, such as Tshiluba and Kiluba (both Luba), Umbundu and Kimbundu (both Mbundu). 2018. ; that is, any combination of CV (with possibly a V- syllable at the start). Grollemund, Rebecca Simon Branford, Koen Bostoen, Andrew Meade, Chris Venditti, and Mark Pagel (2015). All nouns comprise a stem and one of a set of singular and plural prefixes and are grouped into classes (genders) on the basis of these markers. Rexová, K., Bastin, Y., Frynta, D. 2006. See list of Bantu peoples. At a broader level, the family is commonly split in two depending on the reflexes of proto-Bantu tone patterns: Many Bantuists group together parts of zones A through D (the extent depending on the author) as Northwest Bantu or Forest Bantu, and the remainder as Central Bantu or Savanna Bantu. Muganda), whose language is Luganda. The development of a rigorous genealogical classification of many branches of Niger–Congo, not just Bantu, is hampered by insufficient data. [4] Bleek, and later Carl Meinhof, pursued extensive studies comparing the grammatical structures of Bantu languages. [14] This is because kintu refers to 'things' and is used as a dehumanizing term for people who have lost their dignity. Plural is indicated by a change of class, with a resulting change of prefix. The Bantu verb consists of a root that can be accompanied by affixes with various lexical and grammatical functions. Haraka haraka" [come here! In recent times,[when?] [5], Other major Bantu languages include Zulu, with 27 million speakers (15.7 million L2) and Shona, with about 11 million speakers (if Manyika and Ndau are included). 4). Cladistics, 1-20 (amnh.org). Another example is buledi for "bread". The similarity among dispersed Bantu languages had been observed as early as the 17th century. In the 1980s, South African linguists suggested referring to these languages as KiNtu. Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible). [9] McWhorter points out, using a comparison of 16 languages from Bangi-Moi, Bangi-Ntamba, Koyo-Mboshi, Likwala-Sangha, Ngondi-Ngiri and Northern Mozambiqean, mostly from Guthrie Zone C, that many varieties are intercomprehensible.[3]. [31] In Swahili, for example, Kitoto kidogo kimekisoma (for comparison, Kamwana kadoko kariverenga in Shona language) means 'The small child has read it [a book]'. 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. [18][19] Some other sources estimate the Bantu Expansion started closer to 3000 BC.[20]. He coined 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. This word can be considered offensive, particularly in South Africa. Most languages are best known in English without the class prefix (Swahili, Tswana, Ndebele), but are sometimes seen with the (language-specific) prefix (Kiswahili, Setswana, Sindebele). 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. 16 million, L2: 80 million, as of 2015). Endonymically, the term for cultural objects, including language, is formed with the ki- noun class (Nguni ísi-), as in Kiswahili, 'coast language and culture,' and isiZulu, 'Zulu language and culture'. [21][10] Glottolog has incorporated many of these into their classification. Similar effects are seen in loanwords for other non-African CV languages like Japanese. In Zulu the passive form is marked by the suffix -wa, as in thanda ‘love’ and thandwa ‘be loved’; the reciprocal by -an, e.g., thand-an-a ‘love one another’; the causative by -is, e.g., thand-is-a; the applied form (‘for,’ ‘on behalf of’) by -el, e.g., thand-el-a; the intensive by -isis, e.g., thand-isis-a ‘love exceedingly’; and the diminutive by reduplication. [6][7] Ethnologue separates the largely mutually intelligible Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, which, if grouped together, have 20 million speakers.[8]. Special mention may be made of Carl Meinhof’s work in the 1890s, in which he sought to reconstruct what he called ur-Bantu (the words underlying contemporary Bantu forms), and the descriptive work carried out by Clement Doke and the Department of Bantu Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, in the period 1923–53.

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