Bantu Languages

The Bantu languages are a family of more than five hundred related African dialects spoken by approximately 45 to 90 million people as their native language in the central and southern regions of Africa and another 90 to 150 million people as a second language. The word Bantu translates into English as "the People," which is the name the original Bantu people gave their culture. The interrelated Bantu languages are regarded as the most important cultural link connecting the hundreds of ethnic groups throughout Africa that together are called the Bantu peoples.

History and Classification

Linguistic scholars attribute the origins of the first Bantu language to a region of Africa located in present-day Cameroon and southern Nigeria. These speakers of the Proto-Bantu language are assumed today to have been agriculturally based due to the common root words throughout the many Bantu languages related to crops and foods, such as the words for yams and goats. This probable Proto-Bantu ancestor split off from the broader Niger-Congo language family roughly three thousand to four thousand years ago. However, much of the modern-day knowledge regarding the ancestral predecessor to the modern Bantu languages is hypothetical, as no written evidence of this root language exists today.

About thirty-five hundred years ago, these Bantu peoples began to expand eastward toward present-day Nigeria for reasons that are unclear. Ethnologists believe that this migration may have occurred after the development of tradable crops such as cereals, bananas, and yams, but before advancements in iron working. Though native to Asia, bananas and yams had made their way to western Africa around this time, leading to agricultural surpluses and resulting in increased population pressures in the native Bantu lands. The increased variety of crops enabled settlers to utilize broader types of land, encouraging migration.

Further, western Africa is known for its slow-burning hardwoods, allowing the peoples of this region to more easily manage the types of fires necessary for iron working. With greater agricultural and tradable resources, the early Bantu people likely were able to establish trading networks throughout central Africa. These Bantu tribes were able to fill empty and lightly populated regions in a diaspora from their native lands, leading to greater concentrations of their people throughout central Africa and, increasingly, the southern areas of the African continent. This, in turn, likely led to greater societal conflicts between the Bantu and various ethnic groups they encountered. Thanks to their development of weaponry, they were eventually able to take over vast tracts of land throughout Africa. However, the Bantu were not an organized empire controlled from a central location; instead, their gains likely resulted from natural dispersal without intentional oversight. In many locations, the Bantu intermarried with the local populations rather than fully displacing them, which in turn may have helped lead to the broad divergences within the Bantu language family seen today.

Scholars are uncertain about the patterns of dispersal, however. Some experts believe that the Bantu linked up with closely affiliated tribes in present-day Nigeria and then used that location as the center of their future patterns of movement. Others, however, using comparative patterns, argue that the Bantu moved in distinct migration routes from their native homelands in Cameroon and Nigeria, traveling south along the African coast to Angola, or east by tracing the area between the Sahara desert and the central African rain forests.

By 300 A.D., these Bantu speakers had spread south to present-day South Africa and east to the Indian Ocean. Among the populations that remained free of the Bantu culture and its language are the Khoisan peoples of Namibia and Botswana, and the Pygmy tribes located in the west and south of Africa. However, the exact manner of Bantu expansion remains unclear, as few written records exist from Africa from this period.

In later periods, several Bantu groups formed large, multifaceted societies that gave rise to such empires as the Kingdom of Zimbabwe, centered around the Great Zimbabwe complex, and the Zulu empire in southern Africa.

As a result of their broad colonization of central and southern Africa, the Bantu language group is the largest branch of the Niger-Congo family of tongues, which is itself the largest and most widely distributed language group in Africa.

Geographic Distribution and Modern Usage

The Bantu language and its many dialects represent one of the most broadly used languages in Africa, particularly in the southern third of the African continent. Languages categorized as Bantu are the dominant language form in an area that stretches in a line from the Atlantic coast of Cameroon eastward to Kenya on the Indian Ocean and southward to the tip of South Africa. The only region in the southern third of the African continent in which the Bantu language group is not dominant is located in the southwestern portion, which encompasses Namibia and western South Africa—areas where the Khoisan languages remained predominant.

Swahili is perhaps the best known and most commonly spoken of the Bantu languages; in addition, it often serves as a communal language of commerce and government throughout the African Great Lakes region that encompasses Lake Victoria and the Great Rift Valley.

Other prominent forms of Bantu languages include Shona in Zimbabwe, which has roughly eleven million speakers, and the Zulu language, which is spoken by ten million people in South Africa.

Eric Bullard

Bibliography

Johnston, Harry Hamilton. A Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1919. Print.

Jordan, David K. "The Bantu Expansion." Division of Social Sciences. Regents of the University of California. Web. 4 Sept. 2015. http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/resources/clarifications/BantuExpansion.html

Klieman, Kairn A. "The Pygmies Were Our Compass": Bantu and Batwa in the History of West Central Africa, Early Times to c. 1900 C.E. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003. Print.

de Luna, Kathryn M. "Bantu Expansion." Oxford Bibliographies. Oxford University Press. Web. 4 Sept. 2015. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199846733/obo-9780199846733-0165.xml

Maho, Jouni Filip. Indices to Bantu Languages. Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2008. Print.

Nurse, Derek and Gérard Philippson. The Bantu Languages. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.