Bantu

The Bantu languages form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid division of Niger-Congo, with some six hundred languages spoken across Central, Eastern and Southern Africa. They descend from Proto-Bantu, placed by linguists in the borderlands of Cameroon and Nigeria. Between about 1000 and 500 BC its speakers began the Bantu expansion, carrying farming, ironworking and their speech eastward and southward.

Bantu languages are tonal and agglutinative, built around a system of noun classes marked by prefixes, as in the root -ntu for a person, whose plural form ba-ntu means people.

By the 1300s Swahili, enriched with Arabic loanwords, served Kilwa, Mombasa and the other trade cities of the East African coast, while an early form of Shona was spoken by the builders of Great Zimbabwe.