Bantu
pronunciation
How to pronounce Bantu in British English:
UK [ˈbænˈtu:]
How to pronounce Bantu in American English:
US [ˈbæntu]
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- Noun:
- a member of any of a large number of linguistically related peoples of Central and South Africa
- a family of languages widely spoken in the southern half of the African continent
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- Adjective:
- of or relating to the African people who speak one of the Bantoid languages or to their culture
Word Origin
- Bantu
- 1862, applied to south African language group in the 1850s by German linguist Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek (1827-1875), from native Ba-ntu "mankind," from ba-, plural prefix, + ntu "a man, person." Bantustan in a South African context is from 1949.
Example
- 1. The villages we visited were populated by people who spoke bembe , a bantu language .
- 2. To do so he looked at three well-studied parts of the linguistic family tree : the bantu languages of africa , the indo-european group from eurasia and the austronesians of the pacific .
- 3. Almost all gabonese are of bantu origin .
- 4. Like other bantu languages , both use nouns with prefixes .
- 5. She began to speak , not in a bantu tongue but in broken english .