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<br/>'''3''' = 2,000–1,500{{nbsp}}BP: [[Urewe]] nucleus of Eastern Bantu
<br/>'''4'''–'''7''': southward advance
<br/>'''9''' = 2,500{{nbsp}}BP: Congo nucleus
<br/>'''10''' = 2,000–1,000{{nbsp}}BP: last phase](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Bantu Phillipson.png?width=200 "s2cid=3094410 }}</ref>
<br/>'''3''' = 2,000–1,500{{nbsp}}BP: [[Urewe]] nucleus of Eastern Bantu
<br/>'''4'''–'''7''': southward advance
<br/>'''9''' = 2,500{{nbsp}}BP: Congo nucleus
<br/>'''10''' = 2,000–1,000{{nbsp}}BP: last phase")
![zone J around the Great Lakes]]. The [[Jarawan languages]] are spoken in Nigeria.](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Bantu zones.png?width=200 "zone J around the Great Lakes]]. The [[Jarawan languages]] are spoken in Nigeria.")
The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages.
The total number of Bantu languages ranges in the hundreds, depending on the definition of "language" versus "dialect", and is estimated at between 440 and 680 distinct languages. For Bantuic, Linguasphere has 260 outer languages (which are equivalent to languages, inner languages being dialects). John McWhorter said, using a comparison of 16 languages from Bangi-Moi, Bangi-Ntamba, Koyo-Mboshi, Likwala-Sangha, Ngondi-Ngiri and Northern Mozambiquean, mostly from Guthrie Zone C, that many varieties are mutually intelligible.
The total number of Bantu speakers is in the hundreds of millions, estimated around 350 million in the mid-2010s (roughly 30% of the total population of Africa or roughly 5% of world population). Bantu languages are largely spoken southeast of Cameroon, throughout Central Africa, Southeast Africa and Southern Africa. About one-sixth of Bantu speakers, and about one-third of Bantu languages, are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone (c. 60 million speakers as of 2015). See list of Bantu peoples.
The Bantu language with the largest total number of speakers is Swahili; however, for the majority of its speakers it is a second language (L1: c. 16 million, L2: 80 million, as of 2015).
Other major Bantu languages include Xhosa with 13 million speakers (South Africa and Zimbabwe), Zulu with 12 million speakers and Shona with less than 10 million speakers (if Manyika and Ndau are included); Zimbabwe has Kalanga, Matebele, Nambiya and Xhosa speakers. Ethnologue separates the largely mutually intelligible Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, which together have 20 million speakers.
Wikipedia
The Bantu expansion is a hypothesis about the history of the major series of migrations of the original Proto-Bantu-speaking group, which spread from an original nucleus around Central Africa across much of sub-Saharan Africa. In the process, the Proto-Bantu-speaking settlers displaced or absorbed pre-existing hunter-gatherer and pastoralist groups that they encountered.
The primary evidence for this expansion is linguistic – a great many of the languages which are spoken across sub-Equatorial Africa are remarkably similar to each other, suggesting the common cultural origin of their original speakers. The linguistic core of the Bantu languages, which comprise a branch of the Atlantic-Congo language family, was located in the southern regions of Cameroon. However, attempts to trace the exact route of the expansion, to correlate it with archaeological evidence and genetic evidence, have not been conclusive; thus although the expansion is widely accepted as having taken place, many aspects of it remain in doubt or are highly contested.
The expansion is believed to have taken place in at least two waves, between about 3,000 and 2,000 years ago (approximately 1,000 BC to AD 1). Linguistic analysis suggests that the expansion proceeded in two directions: the first went across or along the Northern border of the Congo forest region (towards East Africa), and the second – and possibly others – went south along the African coast into Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Angola, or inland along the many south-to-north flowing rivers of the Congo River system. The expansion reached South Africa, probably as early as AD 300.
