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48-504: Luhya ( / ˈ l uː j ə / ; also Luyia , Oluluyia , Luhia or Luhiya ) is a Bantu language of western Kenya . The various Luhya tribes speak several related languages and dialects, though some of them are no closer to each other than they are to neighboring non-Luhya languages. For example, the Bukusu people are ethnically Luhya, but the Bukusu dialect is a variety of Masaba . (See Luhya people for details.) However, there

96-421: A V- syllable at the start). In other words, a strong claim for this language family is that almost all words end in a vowel, precisely because closed syllables (CVC) are not permissible in most of the documented languages, as far as is understood. This tendency to avoid consonant clusters in some positions is important when words are imported from English or other non-Bantu languages. An example from Chewa :

144-668: A designation referring indiscriminately to language, culture, society, and race"." 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 . 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. This Bantu expansion came to dominate Sub-Saharan Africa east of Cameroon, an area where Bantu peoples now constitute nearly

192-414: A distant third place with 8.2 million speakers ( South Africa and Zimbabwe ), and Shona with less than 10 million speakers (if Manyika and Ndau are included), while Sotho-Tswana languages ( Sotho , Tswana and Pedi ) have more than 15 million speakers (across Botswana , Lesotho , South Africa, and Zambia ). Zimbabwe has Kalanga, Matebele, Nambiya, and Xhosa speakers. Ethnologue separates

240-413: A low or a high tone. A high tone is conventionally indicated with an acute accent (´), and a low tone is either indicated with a grave accent (`) or not marked at all. Proto-Bantu, like its descendants, had an elaborate system of noun classes . Noun stems were prefixed with a noun prefix to specify their meaning. Other words that related or referred to that noun, such as adjectives and verbs, also received

288-429: A prefix that matched the class of the noun (" agreement " or "concord"). Maho offers a broad characterization of five types of Bantu concordial systems. Languages descended from Proto-Bantu can be classified into each of the five types. The following table gives a reconstruction of the system of nominal classes. Spellings have been normalised to use the ɪ and ʊ notations. Guthrie's original work uses y to describe

336-632: Is a core of mutually intelligible dialects that comprise Luhya proper: A comparison between two dialects of Luhya proper, and to two other Bantu languages spoken by the Luhya: The following is the phonology of the Luwanga dialect: Bantu language The total number of Bantu languages is estimated at between 440 and 680 distinct languages, depending on the definition of "language" versus "dialect" . Many Bantu languages borrow words from each other, and some are mutually intelligible . Some of

384-423: Is generally reconstructed to have a relatively small inventory of 11 consonants and 7 vowels. The above phonemes exhibited considerable allophony , and the exact realisation of many of them is unclear. Consonants could not occur at the end of a syllable, only at its beginning. Thus, the syllable structure was generally V or CV, and there were only open syllables . Consonant clusters did not occur except for

432-1174: Is hampered by insufficient data. Simplified phylogeny of northwestern branches of Bantu by Grollemund (2012): A40-50-60-70: Basaa languages , Bafia languages , Mbam languages , Beti language A10-20-30: Sawabantu languages , Manenguba languages A80-90: Makaa–Njem languages B20: Kele languages B10: Myene language B30: Tsogo languages C10-20-30: Ngondi–Ngiri languages , Mboshi languages , Bangi–Ntomba languages C40-D20-D32: Bati–Angba languages , Lega–Binja languages , Bira language B80-C60-70-80: Boma–Dzing languages , Soko languages , Tetela languages , Bushoong languages B40-H10-30-B50-60-70: Sira languages , Kongo languages , Yaka languages , Nzebi languages , Mbete languages , Teke languages L10-H40: Pende languages , Hungana language C50-D10: Soko languages , Lengola language D10-20-30-40-JD50: Mbole–Enya languages , Komo–Bira languages , Shi–Havu languages Other computational phylogenetic analyses of Bantu include Currie et al. (2013), Grollemund et al. (2015), Rexova et al. 2006, Holden et al., 2016, and Whiteley et al. 2018. Glottolog ( 2021 ) does not consider

480-666: Is likely the innovative line cladistically . Northwest Bantu is not a coherent family, but even for Central Bantu the evidence is lexical, with little evidence that it is a historically valid group. Another attempt at a detailed genetic classification to replace the Guthrie system is the 1999 "Tervuren" proposal of Bastin, Coupez, and Mann. However, it relies on lexicostatistics , which, because of its reliance on overall similarity rather than shared innovations , may predict spurious groups of conservative languages that are not closely related . Meanwhile, Ethnologue has added languages to

528-548: Is mainly geographic. The term "narrow Bantu" was coined by the Benue–Congo Working Group to distinguish Bantu as recognized by Guthrie, from the Bantoid languages not recognized as Bantu by Guthrie. In recent times, the distinctiveness of Narrow Bantu as opposed to the other Southern Bantoid languages has been called into doubt, but the term is still widely used. There is no true genealogical classification of

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576-459: Is the extensive use of affixes (see Sotho grammar and Ganda noun classes for detailed discussions of these affixes). Each noun belongs to a class , and each language may have several numbered classes, somewhat like grammatical gender in European languages. The class is indicated by a prefix that is part of the noun, as well as agreement markers on verb and qualificative roots connected with

624-665: Is thought to have originally been spoken in West/Central Africa in the area of what is now Cameroon . About 6,000 years ago, it split off from Proto-Southern Bantoid when the Bantu expansion began to the south and east. Two theories have been put forward about the way the languages expanded: one is that the Bantu-speaking people moved first to the Congo region and then a branch split off and moved to East Africa;

672-862: The Democratic Republic of the Congo . The most widely spoken Bantu language by number of speakers is Swahili , with 16 million native speakers and 80 million L2 speakers (2015). Most native speakers of Swahili live in Tanzania , where it is a national language, while as a second language, it is taught as a mandatory subject in many schools in East Africa, and is a lingua franca of the East African Community . Other major Bantu languages include Lingala with more than 20 million speakers ( Congo , DRC ), followed by Zulu with 13.56 million speakers ( South Africa ), Xhosa at

720-499: The "pre-nasalised" consonants. The so-called "pre-nasalised" consonants were sequences of a nasal and a following obstruent. They could occur anywhere a single consonant was permitted, including word-initially. Pre-nasalised voiceless consonants were rare, as most were voiced. The nasal's articulation adapted to the articulation of the following consonant so the nasal can be considered a single unspecified nasal phoneme (indicated as *N ) which had four possible allophones. Conventionally,

768-431: The (Narrow) Bantu languages. Until recently most attempted classifications only considered languages that happen to fall within traditional Narrow Bantu, but there seems to be a continuum with the related languages of South Bantoid. At a broader level, the family is commonly split in two depending on the reflexes of proto-Bantu tone patterns: many Bantuists group together parts of zones A through D (the extent depending on

816-590: The Guthrie classification which Guthrie overlooked, while removing the Mbam languages (much of zone A), and shifting some languages between groups (much of zones D and E to a new zone J, for example, and part of zone L to K, and part of M to F) in an apparent effort at a semi-genetic, or at least semi-areal, classification. This has been criticized for sowing confusion in one of the few unambiguous ways to distinguish Bantu languages. Nurse & Philippson (2006) evaluate many proposals for low-level groups of Bantu languages, but

864-496: The Guthrie zones, others are found in every zone. These include for example * mbʊ́à 'dog', * -lia 'eat', * ma-béele 'breasts', * i-kúpa 'bone', * i-jína 'name', * -genda 'walk', * mʊ-kíla 'tail', * njɪla 'path', and so on. (The asterisks show that these are reconstructed forms, indicating how the words are presumed to have been pronounced before the Bantu expansion began.) Other vocabulary items tend to be found in either one or

912-514: The adjective prefix ki- (representing the diminutive form of the word) and the verb subject prefix a- . Then comes perfect tense -me- and an object marker -ki- agreeing with implicit kitabu 'book' (from Arabic kitab ). Pluralizing to 'children' gives Vitoto vidogo vimekisoma ( Vana vadoko varikuverenga in Shona), and pluralizing to 'books' ( vitabu ) gives vitoto vidogo vimevisoma . Bantu words are typically made up of open syllables of

960-465: The author) as Northwest Bantu or Forest Bantu , and the remainder as Central Bantu or Savanna Bantu . The two groups have been described as having mirror-image tone systems: where Northwest Bantu has a high tone in a cognate, Central Bantu languages generally have a low tone, and vice versa. Northwest Bantu is more divergent internally than Central Bantu, and perhaps less conservative due to contact with non-Bantu Niger–Congo languages; Central Bantu

1008-557: The beginning of a syllable can be readily observed in such languages as Shona, and the Makua languages . With few exceptions, such as Kiswahili and Rutooro , Bantu languages are tonal and have two to four register tones. Reduplication is a common morphological phenomenon in Bantu languages and is usually used to indicate frequency or intensity of the action signalled by the (unreduplicated) verb stem. Well-known words and names that have reduplication include: Repetition emphasizes

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1056-483: The concept of "language". In addition, delegates at the African Languages Association of Southern Africa conference in 1984 reported that, in some places, the term Kintu has a derogatory significance. This is because kintu refers to "things" and is used as a dehumanizing term for people who have lost their dignity. In addition, Kintu is a figure in some mythologies. In the 1990s,

1104-498: The entire population. Some other sources estimate the Bantu Expansion started closer to 3000 BC. The technical term Bantu, meaning "human beings" or simply "people", was first used by Wilhelm Bleek (1827–1875), as the concept is reflected in many of the languages of this group. A common characteristic of Bantu languages is that they use words such as muntu or mutu for "human being" or in simplistic terms "person", and

1152-432: The highly diverse languages of zone A to a genuine reconstruction is non-existent. Most claimed Proto-Bantu is either confined to particular subgroups, or is widely attested outside Bantu proper." 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 homeland of Proto-Bantu

1200-403: The labial pre-nasal is written *m while the others are written *n. The earlier velar nasal phoneme /ŋ/ , which was present in the Bantoid languages , had been lost in Proto-Bantu. It still occurred phonetically in pre-nasalised consonants but not as a phoneme. The representation of the vowels may differ in particular with respect to the two "middle" levels of closedness. Some prefer to denote

1248-620: 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. The total number of Bantu speakers is estimated to be around 350 million in 2015 (roughly 30% of the population of Africa or 5% of the world population ). Bantu languages are largely spoken southeast of Cameroon , and throughout Central , Southern , Eastern , and Southeast Africa . About one-sixth of Bantu speakers , and one-third of Bantu languages, are found in

1296-471: The languages in which reduplication has the opposite meaning. It usually denotes short durations, or lower intensity of the action, and also means a few repetitions or a little bit more. The following is a list of nominal classes in Bantu languages: Proto-Bantu Proto-Bantu is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Bantu languages , a subgroup of the Southern Bantoid languages . It

1344-426: The largely mutually intelligible Kinyarwanda and Kirundi , which together have 20 million speakers. The similarity among dispersed Bantu languages had been observed as early as the 17th century. The term Bantu as a name for the group was not coined but "noticed" or "identified" (as Bâ-ntu ) by Wilhelm Bleek as the first European in 1857 or 1858, and popularized in his Comparative Grammar of 1862. He noticed

1392-445: The larger ethnolinguistic phylum named by 19th-century European linguists. Bleek's identification was inspired by the anthropological observation of groups frequently self-identifying as "people" or "the true people" (as is the case, for example, with the term Khoikhoi , but this is a kare "praise address" and not an ethnic name). The term narrow Bantu , excluding those languages classified as Bantoid by Malcolm Guthrie (1948),

1440-487: The last hundred years, beginning with Carl Meinhof and his students, great efforts have been made to examine the vocabulary of the approximately 550 present day Bantu languages and to try to reconstruct the proto-forms from which they presumably came. Among other recent works is that by Bastin, Coupez, and Mann, which assembled comparative examples of 92 different words from all the 16 language zones established by Guthrie . Although some words are found only in certain of

1488-446: The near-close set as *e and *o, with the more open set represented as *ɛ and *ɔ. Syllables always ended in a vowel but could also begin with one. Vowels could also occasionally appear in a sequence but did not form diphthongs ; two adjacent vowels were separate syllables. If two of the same vowel occurred together, that created a long vowel, but that was rare. Proto-Bantu distinguished two tones , low and high. Each syllable had either

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1536-493: The noun. Plurality is indicated by a change of class, with a resulting change of prefix. All Bantu languages are agglutinative . The verb has a number of prefixes, though in the western languages these are often treated as independent words. In Swahili , for example, Kitoto kidogo kimekisoma (for comparison, Kamwana kadoko karikuverenga in Shona language ) means 'The small child has read it [a book]'. kitoto 'child' governs

1584-414: The older geographic classification by Guthrie relevant for its ongoing classification based on more recent linguistic studies, and divides Bantu into four main branches: Bantu A-B10-B20-B30 , Central-Western Bantu , East Bantu and Mbam-Bube-Jarawan . Guthrie reconstructed both the phonemic inventory and the vocabulary of Proto-Bantu. The most prominent grammatical characteristic of Bantu languages

1632-413: The other (more likely) is that the two groups split from the beginning, one moving to the Congo region, and the other to East Africa. Like other proto-languages , there is no record of Proto-Bantu. Its words and pronunciation have been reconstructed by linguists. From the common vocabulary which has been reconstructed on the basis of present-day Bantu languages, it appears that agriculture, fishing, and

1680-525: The other of the two main Bantu dialect groups, the Western group (mainly covering Guthrie zones A, B, C, H, K, L, R) or the Eastern group (covering zones D, E, F, G, M, N, P, and S). Words reconstructed for these two groups are known as "Proto-Bantu A" ("PB-A") and "Proto-Bantu B" ("PB-B") respectively, whereas those which extend over the whole Bantu area are known as "Proto-Bantu X" (or "PB-X"). Building on

1728-545: The palatal semi-vowel, which has been normalised to use the j notation. An alternative list of Proto-Bantu noun classes from Vossen & Dimmendaal (2020:151) is as follows: Wilhelm Bleek 's reconstruction consisted of sixteen noun prefixes. Carl Meinhof adapted Bleek's prefixes, changing some phonological features and adding more prefixes, bringing the total number to 21. A. E. Meeussen reduced Meinhof's reconstructed prefixes to 19, but added an additional locative prefix numbered 23. Malcolm Guthrie later reconstructed

1776-407: The plural prefix for human nouns starting with mu- (class 1) in most languages is ba- (class 2), thus giving bantu for "people". Bleek, and later Carl Meinhof , pursued extensive studies comparing the grammatical structures of Bantu languages. The most widely used classification is an alphanumeric coding system developed by Malcolm Guthrie in his 1948 classification of the Bantu languages. It

1824-496: The repeated word in the context that it is used. For instance, "Mwenda pole hajikwai," means "He who goes slowly doesn't trip," while, "Pole pole ndio mwendo," means "A slow but steady pace wins the race." The latter repeats "pole" to emphasize the consistency of slowness of the pace. As another example, "Haraka haraka" would mean "hurrying just for the sake of hurrying" (reckless hurry), as in "Njoo! Haraka haraka" [come here! Hurry, hurry]. In contrast, there are some words in some of

1872-464: The result is not a complete portrayal of the family. Glottolog has incorporated many of these into their classification. The languages that share Dahl's law may also form a valid group, Northeast Bantu . The infobox at right lists these together with various low-level groups that are fairly uncontroversial, though they continue to be revised. The development of a rigorous genealogical classification of many branches of Niger–Congo, not just Bantu,

1920-534: The same 19 classes as Meeussen, but removed locative prefix numbered 23. Hendrikse and Poulos proposed a semantic continuum for Bantu noun classes. Numbers identifying noun classes in the table are referenced from the above table giving a reconstruction of nominal classes. This arrangement permits the classification of noun classes via nonlinguistic factors like perception and cognition. Hendrikse and Poulos have grouped singular and plural classes (such as classes 1 and 2) together, and created "hybrid positions" between

1968-410: The term Kintu was still occasionally used by South African linguists. But in contemporary decolonial South African linguistics, the term Ntu languages is used. Within the fierce debate among linguists about the word "Bantu", Seidensticker (2024) indicates that there has been a "profound conceptual trend in which a "purely technical [term] without any non-linguistic connotations was transformed into

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2016-546: The term to represent the word for "people" in loosely reconstructed Proto-Bantu , from the plural noun class prefix *ba- categorizing "people", and the root *ntʊ̀- "some (entity), any" (e.g. Xhosa umntu "person", abantu "people"; Zulu umuntu "person", abantu "people"). There is no native term for the people who speak Bantu languages because they are not an ethnic group . People speaking Bantu languages refer to their languages by ethnic endonyms , which did not have an indigenous concept prior to European contact for

2064-453: The type CV (consonant-vowel) with most languages having syllables exclusively of this type. The Bushong language recorded by Vansina , however, has final consonants, while slurring of the final syllable (though written) is reported as common among the Tonga of Malawi. The morphological shape of Bantu words is typically CV, VCV, CVCV, VCVCV, etc.; that is, any combination of CV (with possibly

2112-519: The use of boats were already known to the Bantu people before their expansion began, but iron-working was still unknown. This places the date of the start of the expansion somewhere between 3000 BC and 800 BC. A minority view casts doubt on whether Proto-Bantu, as a unified language, actually existed in the time before the Bantu expansion, or whether Proto-Bantu was not a single language but a group of related dialects. One scholar, Roger Blench , writes: "The argument from comparative linguistics which links

2160-641: The varying categories (such as the placement of class 14). Classes 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 13 are generally accepted as being the plural forms of noun classes in Proto-Bantu. Classes 14 onward do not have a plural form defined as concretely as classes 1–13 do. Meeussen proposed pairings of 1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8, 9/10, 11/10, 12/13, 14/6, 15/6, and "probably" 19/13. Guthrie proposed pairings of 1/2, 1a/2, 3/4, 3, 5/6, 5, 6, 7/8, 9/10, 9, 11/10, 12/13, 14, 14/6. Maho combines pairings by De Wolf, Meeussen, and Guthrie, offering alternative pairings such as 3/10, 3/13, 9/4, 11/4, 12/4, 14/4, 14/10, 15/4, 19/4, and 19/10. During

2208-406: The word "school", borrowed from English, and then transformed to fit the sound patterns of this language, is sukulu . That is, sk- has been broken up by inserting an epenthetic -u- ; -u has also been added at the end of the word. Another example is buledi for "bread". Similar effects are seen in loanwords for other non-African CV languages like Japanese . However, a clustering of sounds at

2256-557: Was introduced in the 1960s. The prefix ba- specifically refers to people. Endonymically, the term for cultural objects, including language, is formed with the ki- noun class (Nguni ísi- ), as in KiSwahili (Swahili language and culture), IsiZulu (Zulu language and culture) and KiGanda (Ganda religion and culture). In the 1980s, South African linguists suggested referring to these languages as KiNtu. The word kintu exists in some places, but it means "thing", with no relation to

2304-462: Was most likely in the upland forest fringes around the Sanaga and Nyong rivers of Southern Cameroon. It was formerly thought that proto-Bantu originated somewhere in the border region between Nigeria and Cameroon. However, new research revealed that was more likely the original area of Proto-Southern Bantoid, before it spread southwards into Cameroon long before Proto-Bantu emerged. Proto-Bantu

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