11 Facts About Bantu languages

Bantu languages are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, and Southeast Africa.

Total number of Bantu languages speakers is in the hundreds of millions, estimated around 350 million in the mid-2010s .

Bantu languages are largely spoken southeast of Cameroon, throughout Central Africa, Southeast Africa and Southern Africa.

Term narrow Bantu, excluding those languages classified as Bantoid by Guthrie, was introduced in the 1960s.

Bantu languages descend from a common Proto-Bantu language, which is believed to have been spoken in what is Cameroon in Central Africa.

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The term "narrow Bantu" was coined by the Benue–Congo Working Group to distinguish Bantu as recognized by Guthrie, from the Bantoid languages not recognized as Bantu by Guthrie.

Until recently most attempted classifications only considered languages that happen to fall within traditional Narrow Bantu, but there seems to be a continuum with the related languages of South Bantoid.

Northwest Bantu is more divergent internally than Central Bantu, and perhaps less conservative due to contact with non-Bantu Niger–Congo languages; Central Bantu is likely the innovative line cladistically.

Northwest Bantu languages is clearly not a coherent family, but even for Central Bantu languages 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 verb stem.

Virtually all Bantu languages have a Subject–verb–object word order with some exceptions such as the Nen language which has a Subject-Object-Verb word order.