Sintu

Sintu, also called siNtu or the Southern Bantu languages, is the broad family of Bantu speech covering southeastern Africa, from the Makhuwa coast of northern Mozambique and the Shona lands of the Zimbabwe plateau to the Nguni, Sotho and Tswa-Ronga tongues of South Africa. Its name joins the prefix that marks a language to the common Bantu word for a person, ntu.

Proto-Southern Bantu was spoken sometime after 1000 where South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique meet, as farmers spread across the region; Nguni speakers had reached the southeastern coast before the 1500s.

Contact with Khoisan herders and hunters left its mark on the southern languages, above all the click consonants heard in Xhosa and Zulu. These were oral languages until missionaries gave them Roman alphabets: the first printed Xhosa works appeared from the Lovedale press in 1823.