Concept
The Bantu peoples are an ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct native African ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages. The languages are native to 24 countries spread over a vast area from Central Africa to Southeast Africa and into Southern Africa. There are several hundred Bantu languages. Depending on the definition of "language" or "dialect", it is estimated that there are between 440 and 680 distinct languages. The total number of speakers is in the hundreds of millions, ranging at roughly 350 million in the mid-2010s (roughly 30% of the population of Africa, or roughly 5% of the total world population). About 60 million speakers (2015), divided into some 200 ethnic or tribal groups, are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone. The larger of the individual Bantu groups have populations of several million, e.g., the people of Rwanda and Burundi (25 million), the Baganda people of Uganda (10 million as of 2019), the Shona of Zimbabwe (15 million ), the Zulu of South Africa (12 million ), the Luba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (7 million ), the Sukuma of Tanzania (9 million ), the Kikuyu of Kenya (8.1 million ), the Xhosa people of Southern Africa (8.1 million as of 2011), or the Pedi of South Africa (5.7 million as of 2017). Genetic studies have evidenced that multiple West African populations, including Bantu populations, inherited genes from an archaic human ancestor population that diverged before modern humans and Neanderthals split. Researchers found that a lineage splitting 624,000 years ago and introgressing into the African population 50,000 years ago is able to explain 2% to 19% of the genes present in modern West-African populations. Abantu is the Xhosa and Zulu word for people. It is the plural of the word 'umuntu', meaning 'person', and is based on the stem '--ntu', plus the plural prefix 'aba'. In linguistics, the word Bantu, for the language families and its speakers, is an artificial term based on the reconstructed Proto-Bantu term for "people" or "humans".
