Do you Bantu?

Jambo!!!!!!!! (which means hello in Swahili, a language in the Bantu family.)

Bantu was the universally accepted language spoke among inhabitants in the Sub Saharan Africa region before 1500. The language belong to the Niger-Congo family. There are about 513 languages that make up the large Bantu grouping. Presently, Bantu is spoken east and south of the present day country of Nigeria. The term "Bantu" actually means: People.

When it comes to the actual language structure, they tend to use a lot of affixes. An affix is a bound morpheme which adds lexical or syntactic information to a root or a stem. (SIL international.) http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnAffixGrammar.htm
Their words are also typically made up of open syllables. These open syllable words often follow the pattern of CV, which is a consonant-vowel. The words are set up mostly with the following letter and sound patterns, CV, VCV, CVCV and VCVCV. By looking at these patterns, you may notice that all of the words end in vowels, that's because closed vowels, CVC, are not allowed or a part of their language structure.

Reduplication is a common trend found in the Bantu languages. For example, the word for "strike" is piga, so when they want to say "strike repeatedly", they simply say "pigapiga."

There are several common Bantu languages:
1) Swahili 2) Kongo 3) Pedi 4) Tswana 5) Rundi 6) Ngumba 7) Basaa 8) Duala, just to name a few, there are actually 48 which are spoken throughout 22 countries.

Some words that we use today came from the Bantu languages before the 1500's. They are as follows, bongo, jumbo, gumbo, Jenga (what a fun game!), marimba, rumba, safari, simba (mufasa's baby boy), and mambo (number 5...anyone, anyone?).

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Bantu+language

There is no doubt that a universal language shaped Sub Saharan Africa and gave the people an ability to communicate with each other and learn. Being able to share ideas also gave the people of the Sub Saharan region an opportunity to grow and advance through a cultural revolution.

Until next time, thanks for reading!!

http://bama.ua.edu/~golar001/The%20History%20of%20Bantu%20Languages.pdf