Abstract

The Bantu languages dominate the southern half of the African land mass and are spoken as first languages by an estimated 220 million speakers, nearly a third of Africa’s total population. In their geographical extent, they come into contact with representatives of all the other major African language families: Cushitic (of Afroasiatic superstock) and Nilo-Saharan languages in the north-east, Khoisan in the south (and minimally in the north-east due to the retention of the Khoisan language Sandawe in north-eastern Tanzania, surrounded by Bantu languages) and its closest relatives among the Niger-Congo languages in the north-west.