ABSTRACT

Bantu-speaking communities live in Africa south of a line from Nigeria across the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC: formerly Zaire), Uganda, and Kenya, to southern Somalia in the east. Most language communities between that line and the Cape are Bantu. The exceptions are pockets: in the south, some small and fast dwindling Khoisan communities; in Tanzania one, maybe two, Khoisan outliers; in the northeast of the area, larger communities speaking Cushitic (part of Afro-Asiatic); and along and inside the northern border many communities speaking Nilo-Saharan languages and Adamawa-Ubangian (Niger-Congo but non-Bantu) languages. North of that line, in Africa, there is also a longstanding Swahili-speaking community on the island of Socotra, off the Somali coast but technically part of the Republic of South Yemen. Excluding this, then we find communities speaking Bantu languages indigenous to twenty-seven African countries: Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, CAR, Comoros, Congo, DRC, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mayotte, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The Bantu family is recognized as forming part of the Niger-Congo phylum. Non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages are spoken north and mainly west of Bantu. Starting in the north of the DRC, they stretch west across the CAR, Cameroon, Nigeria, and right across all west Africa as far as Senegal. Of some 750 million Africans (Times Atlas 1999) the most recent publication (Grimes 2000, also pc) estimates that around 400 million people speak Niger-Congo languages, of whom some 240 million are Bantu-speakers, roughly one African in three.