Bantu Language

The Bantu peoples of Central, Southern, Eastern, and Southeast Africa speak around 600 different languages collectively referred to as the Bantu language family. The majority of Southern Bantoid languages are comprised of these. Between 440 and 680 different languages are thought to make up the whole Bantu language family. In order to represent the word for "people" in Proto-Bantu, Wilhelm Bleek created the term "Bantu" in 1857 or 1858. Using the plural noun class prefix ba-, which categorizes "people," and the root nt-, which means "some (entity), any," he created the phrase to reflect the word for "people" in loosely reconstructed Proto-Bantu (e.g., Zulu umuntu "person," abantu "people").

The frequent usage of affixes in Bantu languages is the most obvious grammatical feature. Each noun has a class to which it belongs, and each language may have a number of these classes. The verb contains several prefixes and is agglutinative in all Bantu languages. A prefix that is a component of the noun as well as agreement markers on verb and qualificative roots associated to the noun are used to identify the class. A change in class, which causes a change in prefix, denotes the plural.

Open syllables of the CV (consonant-vowel) type are the most common syllable structure in Bantu words. Vansina described the Bushong language as having final consonants, although the Tonga of Malawi are said to frequently slur the final word.

Most Bantu words finish in a vowel and are typically CV, VCV, CVCV, VCVCV, etc. When terms from English or other non-Bantu languages, such Chewa, Shona, and the Makua languages, are imported, it is crucial to keep this inclination to avoid consonant clusters in certain situations in mind. Most Bantu languages have two to four register tones and are tonal.