bantu

Bantu refers to a large and diverse group of peoples and languages in sub-Saharan Africa. The Bantu languages are a branch of the Niger-Congo language family. The name derives from ba-ntu, the word for "people" in many Bantu languages, and was adopted by linguists in the 19th and early 20th centuries to designate this language cluster.

Bantu-speaking communities occupy a broad belt from central and western Africa to southern Africa. They include many distinct groups, such as the Zulu, Xhosa, Shona, Sotho, Tswana, Kikuyu, Kongo, Luba, and Swahili-speaking communities along the East African coast. Linguistically, Bantu languages share features such as noun-class systems and a rich system of verbal affixes, though there is substantial diversity across the family.

Historically, the Bantu languages are associated with the Bantu expansion, a long series of migrations beginning roughly 3,000 to 2,000 years ago from a homeland in West-Central Africa, spreading east and south. The spread is thought to have involved agriculture and ironworking, and it reshaped linguistic and cultural landscapes across sub-Saharan Africa, interacting with preexisting populations and later historical processes such as trade and state formation.

Today, Bantu-speaking peoples form some of the continent's most populous and culturally diverse communities.