Bantu languages are a group of over 500 closely related African languages spoken by Bantu ethnic groups across a vast region of sub-Saharan Africa. These languages belong to the larger Niger-Congo language family, which is one of the world’s largest language families.

The term “Bantu” itself means “people” or “humans” in several Bantu languages, reflecting the shared cultural and linguistic heritage of the communities that speak these languages.

Bantu languages are characterised by certain linguistic features, such as noun class systems, which categorise nouns into classes based on their characteristics, and agglutinative morphology, where affixes are added to roots to convey meaning.

Some well-known Bantu languages include Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa, Kikuyu, and Shona, among many others. Swahili, for example, is spoken as a first language by millions of people along the East African coast and is a prominent lingua franca in several countries.