Notable Bantu Languages
Following are the principal Bantu languages of each country. Included are those languages that constitute at least 1% of the population and have at least 10% the number of speakers of the largest Bantu language in the country.
Most languages are best known in English without the class prefix (Swahili, Tswana, Ndebele), but are sometimes seen with the (language-specific) prefix (Kiswahili, Setswana, Sindebele). In a few cases prefixes are used to distinguish languages with the same root in their name, such as Tshiluba and Kiluba (both Luba), Umbundu and Kimbundu (both Mbundu). The bare (prefixless) form typically does not occur in the language itself, but is the basis for other words based on the ethnicity. So, in the country of Botswana the people are the Batswana, one person is a Motswana, and the language is Setswana; and in Uganda, centred on the kingdom of Buganda, the dominant ethnicity are the Baganda (sg. Muganda), whose language is Luganda.
Lingua franca
Angola
Botswana
Burundi
Cameroon
Central African Republic
Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa)
Equatorial Guinea
Kenya
Lesotho
Malawi
Mozambique
Namibia
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Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville)
Rwanda
South Africa
Swaziland
Tanzania
Uganda
Zambia
Zimbabwe
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This list is incomplete; an attempt at a full list of Bantu languages (with various conflations and a puzzlingly diverse nomenclature) was found in The Bantu Languages of Africa, 1959.
Read more about this topic: Bantu Languages
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