subject: The Bantu Languages [print this page] The Bantu languages are spoken by most of the people who live in central and southern Africa. These people are members of one of the three great races of the earth, the "black" race, from which American Negroes are descended. The languages in this group are very much alike, but also have some differences, just as the French and Italian languages belong to the same language group and are alike in some ways but very different in others. The word Bantu is a word for "men" in this group of languages.
We do not know how old the earliest Bantu language is. It is thought that almost three thousand years ago a powerful tribe of Negroes in the heart of Africa pushed south through the jungle. They spoke the original Bantu, and gave their language to the tribes they met. This is why tribes of pygmies only 4 feet high, in one part of Africa, and tribes of giants as much as 7 feet high, in another part, speak languages that are so much alike.
As the language spread into the south it began to change, but not so much that one tribe could not understand the language of another tribe. In the English language, we learn that a word may have one of three genders. It may be masculine, for a man (for example, he) or feminine, for a woman (she) or neuter, for a thing (it). The Bantu languages have as many as eight different genders! There are different genders for human beings, plants, and animals, and even for round objects, long objects, and so on
