If you pull up a map of languages spoken in the continent of Africa, you might find that, with the exception of the click languages, Afrikaans, and colonial language, pretty much most languages in Africa south of Cameroon are classified as some Bantu language. In fact, depending on who you ask, or how you define a language in contrast to a dialect, there could be up to around 700 Bantu languages, or perhaps as low as around 450 Bantu languages. Given the dominance of Bantu languages in the southern half of the African continent, I thought it would be great to give a little introduction to this group of languages, and its salient features.

The most well-known Bantu language is perhaps the Swahili language (kiSwahili) spoken in East Africa, in countries such as Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, estimated to have over 90 million speakers, though the higher end of estimates may go over 100 million speakers. Several more examples of relatively widely spoken Bantu languages include isiXhosa and isiZulu in South Africa, Lingala in Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Shona in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. On the other extreme, some Bantu languages are spoken by only several thousand speakers, or perhaps even several hundred speakers, such as the Benga language spoken in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, estimated to have around 5000 native speakers. Interestingly, the Sidi language is a Bantu language spoken in India and Pakistan, and is related to Swahili, making it one of the few examples, if not, the only example of Bantu languages being spoken in South Asia.

The spread and diversification of the Bantu languages have been proposed to trace back to the Bantu migrations southwards and eastwards into the African continent around 3000 years ago, who brought along agricultural methods with them. During these migrations, the Bantu peoples would have displaced or assimilated hunter-gathering and pastoralist communities living in the area as well. When and where precisely the Bantu expansion began is still under debate, though the leading theory points towards the highlands of modern-day Cameroon and Nigeria to be where the Bantu expansion might have started.

Peering beyond this, I also notice many undocumented or questionably attested languages under the Bantu umbrella, as with a messy pattern of classifications of the Bantu languages. While some languages have been identified to be part of smaller branches, how these branches coalesce or are lumped by linguists differs between linguists and language catalogues. For instance, isiXhosa and Northern Ndebele are classified as Zunda languages, and going one level up, the Nguni languages, but some label the Nguni languages as part of the Southern Bantu languages, or perhaps Zone S.

One of the first efforts to classify the Bantu languages into smaller branches was undertaken by Malcolm Guthrie, whose 1948 classification split the Bantu languages up into 16 geographic zones labeled A to S, omitting the letter I. This system does not inform the genealogical relationships between these Bantu groups. Other approaches also mentioned the disputed “Narrow Bantu” group, while others also propose more lumpy groupings such as “Southern Bantu”, “Northwest Bantu”, and “Central Bantu”. More recent approaches propose a part-geographic, part-genetic classification that relied on lexicostatistical approaches (i.e. similarity) in contrast to identifying innovations amongst certain groups, but they have been criticised for the likelihood of predicting spurious groups of languages that are not really actually that closely related. Nevertheless, popular catalogues such as Ethnologue and Glottolog would adopt these different approaches to classifying the Bantu languages.

Nevertheless, the Bantu languages share several phonotactic and grammatical features that ultimately lead to this very grouping. Firstly, Bantu languages tend to use open syllables, that is, syllable structures that follow a V (vowel) or a CV (consonant – vowel) pattern. This also means that there is an aversion to consonant clusters (like CCV syllables), in which epenthetic vowels are inserted to break up consonant clusters in words of foreign origin, including school, which is broken up into sukulu in Chichewa (spoken in Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique). In some way, this resembles how epenthetic vowels are inserted into loanwords with consonant clusters in Japanese. Exceptions do exist, though these are typically rare. Final consonants in syllables (CVC, VC syllables) occur in sporadic examples, such as the Bushong language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Additionally, Bantu languages tend to be tonal, with between two and four register tones in most languages.

While Bantu languages are pretty much agglutinative in nature, meaning that words are formed and have their meanings enriched by the addition of affixes around a single word stem, the most salient feature of the Bantu languages is how they distinguish different kinds of nouns. In many European languages we are more or less familiar with, we might approximate or parallel this feature with grammatical gender. Here, in the Bantu languages, nouns may be classified as ‘humans’, ‘plants’, ‘animals’, ‘animate’, inanimate’, ‘abstract nouns’, and so on, with each nominal class being headed by a classifier prefix. For instance, in isiXhosa, the word umntu directly translates to ‘person’, with the plural being abantu. These words may be split into the um- and aba- prefixes for the singular and plural forms of humans, and the word root -ntu. In fact, the titular word, Bantu, is derived from a suggested reconstruction of the prefix for people, *ba- and the root word *ntʊ̀-, which has been suggested to mean “entity”. Similarly, the endonyms of respective Bantu languages may carry the prefix used to refer to languages among other things, such as Kiswahili, isiXhosa, and isiZulu. However, some Bantu languages recognise and distinguish between more nominal classes than others, and perhaps how some nouns are classified into these classes may vary from language to language.

While the phrase hakuna matata might just be one of the most well known popular culture features of Bantu languages that has entered the anglosphere, there are several other English words which have been borrowed from various Bantu languages. Animal terms such as chimpanzee, derived from ci-mpenze in Vili or chimpenze in Tshiluba, are actually loanwords from the Bantu languages. Safari, an internet browser and an overland journey into the wilderness to observe wildlife, is also derived from Swahili, which means ‘journey’, though it ultimately traces back to the Arabic سفر (safar), which also means ‘journey’ or ‘travel’. And of course, the Linux distribution Ubuntu also traces its name back to the Bantu languages, translating to ‘humanity’, or even ‘I am because we are’.

Lastly, to wrap up, pretty much most Bantu languages are written using the Latin alphabet or the Arabic script today. However, with some pan-Africanism movements and efforts, there has been a rise in development or use of indigenous writing systems to write their languages. In fact, we have covered them here before, such as the Mwangwego script for Chichewa, the Mandombe script for some Bantu languages in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the experimental Ditema tsa Dinoko or Isibheqe Sohlamvu for some Southern Bantu languages. Why not add the introductions to these writing systems onto your reading list?