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The Bantu peoples are an indigenous ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct native African ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages. The languages are native to countries spread over a vast area from West Africa, to Central Africa, Southeast Africa and into Southern Africa. Bantu people also inhabit southern areas of Northeast ...
Many Bantu languages borrow words from each other, and some are mutually intelligible. [4] Some of the languages are spoken by a very small number of people, for example the Kabwa language was estimated in 2007 to be spoken by only 8500 people but was assessed to be a distinct language. [5]
In 1999, the United States classified the Bantu refugees from Somalia as a priority and the United States Department of State first began what has been described as the most ambitious resettlement plan ever from Africa, with thousands of Bantus scheduled for resettlement in America. [45] In 2003, the first Bantu immigrants began to arrive in U ...
The Bantu expansion was [3] [4] [5] a major series of migrations of the original Proto-Bantu-speaking group, [6] [7] which spread from an original nucleus around West-Central Africa. In the process, the Proto-Bantu-speaking settlers displaced, eliminated or absorbed pre-existing hunter-gatherer and pastoralist groups that they encountered.
The southern Twa today live in close economic symbiosis with the tribes among which they are scattered—Ngambwe, Havakona, Zimba and Himba. None of the individuals I have observed differs physically from the neighboring Bantu. [15] These peoples live in desert environments. Accounts are limited and tend to confuse the Twa with the San. [2]
Most claimed Proto-Bantu is either confined to particular subgroups, or is widely attested outside Bantu proper." [6] According to this hypothesis, Bantu is actually a polyphyletic group that combines a number of smaller language families which ultimately belong to the (much larger) Southern Bantoid language family.
The term "Bantoid" was first used by Krause in 1895 for languages that showed resemblances in vocabulary to Bantu. Joseph Greenberg, in his 1963 The Languages of Africa, defined Bantoid as the group to which Bantu belongs together with its closest relatives; this is the sense in which the term is still used today.
The Southern Bantu languages are a large group of Bantu languages, largely validated in Janson (1991/92). [1] They are nearly synonymous with Guthrie's Bantu zone S , apart from the debated exclusion of Shona and inclusion of Makhuwa .