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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 Bantu languages descend from a common Proto-Bantu language, which is believed to have been spoken in what is now Cameroon in Central Africa. [21] An estimated 2,500–3,000 years ago (1000 BC to 500 BC), speakers of the Proto-Bantu language began a series of migrations eastward and southward, carrying agriculture with them.
Proto-Eskimo–Aleut. Proto-Eskimo. Proto-Inuit; Proto-Algic. Proto-Algonquian; Proto-Muskogean; Proto-Iroquoian; Proto-Uto-Aztecan. Proto-Nahuan; Proto-Mayan; Proto-Mixe–Zoquean language; Proto-Totonacan language; Proto-Na-Dené. Proto-Athabaskan; Proto-Oto-Manguean Proto-Otomí Proto-Mixtecan Proto-Mixtec Proto-Tucanoan Proto-Tupian
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.
It is Southern Bantoid which contains the Bantu languages, which are spoken across most of Sub-Saharan Africa. This makes Benue–Congo one of the largest subdivisions of the Niger–Congo language family, both in number of languages, of which Ethnologue counts 976 (2017), and in speakers, numbering perhaps 350 million.
The Bantu expansion [3] [4] [5] was 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.
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Within a subset of Southern Bantu, the label "Nguni" is used both genetically (in the linguistic sense) and typologically (quite apart from any historical significance).. The Nguni languages are closely related, and in many instances different languages are mutually intelligible; in this way, Nguni languages might better be construed as a dialect continuum than as a cluster of separate languages.