Which language is spoken by the Bantu of East Africa?

Which language is spoken by the Bantu of East Africa?

Swahili
Swahili, which is spoken by five million people as a mother tongue and some 30 million as a second language, is a Bantu lingua franca important in both commerce and literature.

What new language was created from the Arabic and the Bantu language?

The Swahili language developed when the Bantu language and Arabic collided. This all began when the Bantu speaking people migrated across central Africa to the east coast.

How much of Swahili is Arabic?

6. If I learn Swahili, will it help me with any other languages? Around 35% of the Swahili vocabulary comes from Arabic. This is due to more than twelve centuries of contact with Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the coast of Zanj.

What language do the Bantu speak?

Bantu languages such as Swahili, Zulu, Chichewa or Bemba are spoken by an estimated 240 million speakers in 27 African countries, and are one of the most important language groups in Africa in terms of geographical and demographic distribution.

Why are Bantu languages called Class languages?

The Bantu languages are also called ‘class languages’ because they … are classical languages of the continent of Africa. 3. have nouns which are grouped into classes according to prefixes.

Who speaks Bantu?

Bantu languages are largely spoken southeast of Cameroon, throughout Central Africa, Southeast Africa and Southern Africa. About one-sixth of the 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).

What is the original African language?

The most spoken language on the continent of Africa today is Swahili. It is the native language of the Bantu group known as the Swahili people. It is spoken in over ten African countries and has more than a 100 million native speakers.

What’s the most spoken language in Africa?

While Arabic is the most spoken language in Africa, there’s plenty more – other popular languages include Amharic, Berber, Portuguese, Oromo, Igbo, Yoruba, Zulu and Shona.

Why is Swahili a Bantu language?

Under Arab influence, Swahili originated as a lingua franca used by several closely related Bantu-speaking tribal groups.” This union was not presented as an equal marriage between the two cultures. Swahili poetic wealth was attributed to the linguistic and cultural oomph injected by Arabic into Bantu languages.

What are some Arabic words?

Basic Arabic Phrases

• naäam. Yes.
• laa. No.
• min faDlik. Please.
• shukran. Thank you.
• äafwan. You’re welcome.
• aläafw. Excuse me.
• arjuu almaädhira. I am sorry.
• sabaaH alkhayr. Good morning.

How many languages are spoken in Africa?

2,000 languages
Languages of Africa. There are an estimated 2,000 languages spoken in Africa. The American linguist Joseph Greenberg argued that they fall into six major linguistic families: Afroasiatic stretches from North Africa to the Horn of Africa and Southwest Asia.

Why are the Bantu languages so widespread in Africa?

Linguistic, archeological and genetic evidence indicates that during the course of the Bantu expansion, “independent waves of migration of western African and East African Bantu-speakers into southern Africa occurred.” In some places, genetic evidence suggests that Bantu language expansion was largely a result of …

Is the Swahili language a Bantu language?

Swahili is an interesting language; its grammar and structure is Bantu but many of its words have Arabic roots. It became the lingua franca of east Africa.

Which is the most widely spoken language outside Africa?

The Semitic languages are now the only branch of Afroasiatic that is spoken outside Africa. Some of the most widely spoken Afroasiatic languages include Arabic (a Semitic language, and a recent arrival from West Asia), Somali (Cushitic), Berber (Berber), Hausa (Chadic), Amharic (Semitic) and Oromo (Cushitic).

What kind of suffixes do Bantu languages use?

Indo-European languages (and others too) usually show gender differences, singular/plural, and agreement by means of suffixes. Bantu languages use prefixes and the harmonic concord. – in almost all these languages, the root word for person or people is ‘ntu’;

How did the Swahili language become a lingua franca?

They brought Islam and established the Swahili culture. Swahili is an interesting language; its grammar and structure is Bantu but many of its words have Arabic roots. It became the lingua franca of east Africa.