Bantu peoples is used as a general label for the 300–600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak Bantu languages.[1] They inhabit a geographical area stretching east and southward from Central Africa across the African Great Lakes region down to Southern Africa.[1] Bantu is a major branch of the Niger-Congo language family spoken by most populations in Africa. There are about 650 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility,[2] though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages.[3]
Around 3000 years ago, speakers of the Proto-Bantu language group began a millennia-long series of migrations eastward from their homeland between West Africa and Central Africa, at the border of eastern Nigeria and Cameroon.[4] This Bantu expansion first introduced Bantu peoples to central, southern, and southeastern Africa, regions they had previously been absent from. The proto-Bantu migrants in the process assimilated and/or displaced a number of earlier inhabitants that they came across, including Pygmyand Khoisan populations in the center and south, respectively. They also encountered some Afro-Asiatic outlier groups in the southeast, who had been there for centuries migrating from Northeast Africa.[5][6]
Individual Bantu groups today often include millions of people. Among these are the Luba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with over 13.5 million people; the Zulu of South Africa, with over 10 million people; the Sukuma of Tanzania which are about eight million people, Kikuyu of Kenya, with over six million people. Although only around five million individuals speak the Arabic-influenced Swahili language as their mother tongue,[7] it is used as a lingua franca by over 140 million people throughout Southeast Africa.[8] Swahili also serves as one of the official languages of the African Union.
I am not in High school so I got this from internet.
