Bantu language family

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the largest branch of the Niger-Congo language phylum, comprising approximately 500 to 600 languages spoken by roughly 350 million people across sub-Saharan Africa from Cameroon in the west to Tanzania in the east and South Africa in the south; Bantu languages are characterised by a noun class system in which nouns are assigned to categories marked by prefixes that trigger agreement on verbs, adjectives, and pronouns — a morphological feature of extraordinary complexity; the Bantu expansion, which began roughly 3,000–5,000 years ago from a homeland in the Cameroon–Nigeria borderland, was one of the most significant demographic and cultural migrations in human prehistory, spreading agriculture, iron-working, and linguistic commonality across the continent's southern half