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What does the word Bantu refer to?
Definition of Bantu 1 : a family of Niger-Congo languages spoken in central and southern Africa. 2 : a member of any of a group of African peoples who speak Bantu languages.
What is a Bantu in Africa?
They are Black African speakers of Bantu languages of several hundred indigenous ethnic groups. The Bantu live in sub-Saharan Africa, spread over a vast area from Central Africa across the African Great Lakes to Southern Africa.
What country is Bantu?
Today, the Bantu-speaking peoples are found in many sub-Saharan countries such as Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, and Burundi among other countries in the Great Lakes region.
What is the most common Bantu language?
Swahili
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).
What does Bantu mean South Africa?
[2] Abantu (or ‘Bantu’ as it was used by colonists) is the Zulu word for people. It is the plural of the word ‘umuntu’, meaning ‘person’, and is based on the stem ‘–ntu’ plus the plural prefix ‘aba’. This original meaning changed through the history of South Africa.
Where is Bantu Africa?
The Africa Southeastern Bantu region is enormous, extending more than 2,500 miles north to south. It stretches from modern-day Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania in the north; encompasses Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe in its center; and finally opens into Botswana, South Africa, Namibia and Angola.
Is South Africa Bantu?
South African Bantu-speaking peoples are the majority of Black South Africans. However, Bantu is used without pejorative connotations in other parts of Africa and is still used in South Africa as the group term for the language family.
What does the word Bantu mean quizlet?
Bantu. Means “person” or “people” Bantu speakers called themselves this. The Bantu homeland.
Where does the word Bantu come from?
Origin of the name Bantu The word Bantu for the language families and its speakers is an artificial term based on the reconstructed Proto-Bantu term for “people” or “humans”. It was first introduced (as Bâ-ntu) by Wilhelm Bleek in 1857 or 1858, and popularised in his Comparative Grammar of 1862.