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Bantu peoples is used as a general label for the 300–600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak Bantu languages. They inhabit a geographical area stretching east and southward from Central Africa across the African Great Lakes region down to Southern Africa.〔 Bantu is a major branch of the Niger-Congo language family spoken by most populations in Africa. There are about 650 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility,〔Derek Nurse, 2006, "Bantu Languages", in the ''Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics''〕 though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and ''Ethnologue'' counts 535 languages.〔(Ethnologue report for Southern Bantoid ). The figure of 535 includes the 13 Mbam languages considered Bantu in Guthrie's classification and thus counted by Nurse (2006)〕 About 3000 years ago, speakers of the proto-Bantu language group began a millennia-long series of migrations eastward from their homeland between West Africa and Central Africa at the border of eastern Nigeria and Cameroon.〔Philip J. Adler, Randall L. Pouwels, ''World Civilizations: To 1700 Volume 1 of World Civilizations'', (Cengage Learning: 2007), p.169.〕 This Bantu expansion first introduced Bantu peoples to central, southern, and southeastern Africa, regions they had previously been absent from. The proto-Bantu migrants in the process assimilated and/or displaced a number of earlier inhabitants that they came across, including Khoisan populations in the south and Afro-Asiatic groups in the southeast.〔Toyin Falola, Aribidesi Adisa Usman, ''Movements, borders, and identities in Africa'', (University Rochester Press: 2009), pp.4-5.〕 Individual Bantu groups today often include millions of people. Among these are the Luba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with over 13.5 million people; the Zulu of South Africa, with over 10 million people; and the Kikuyu of Kenya, with over 6 million people. Although only around five million individuals speak the Bantu Swahili language as their mother tongue, it is used as a lingua franca by over 140 million people throughout Southeast Africa.〔Irele 2010〕 Swahili also serves as one of the official languages of the African Union. == Etymology == The word ''Bantu'', and its variations, means "people" or "humans". The root in Proto-Bantu is reconstructed as *-ntu. Versions of the word ''Bantu'' (that is, the root plus the class 2 noun class prefix *ba-) occur in all Bantu languages: for example, as ''watu'' in Swahili; ''bantu'' in Kikongo; ''batu'' in Lingala; ''bato'' in Duala; ''abanto'' in Gusii; ''andũ'' in Kikuyu; ''abantu'' in Zulu, Xhosa, Runyakitara, and Ganda; ''wandru'' in Ngazidjia Comorian; ''abantru'' in Mpondo; ''bãtfu'' in Phuthi; ''bantfu'' in Swati; ''banu'' in Lala; ''vanhu'' in Shona and Tsonga; ''batho'' in Sesotho; ''vandu'' in some Luhya dialects; ''vhathu'' in Venda; and ''mbaityo'' in Tiv. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Bantu peoples」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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