Sources:
Countries | Number of languages |
Number of Bantu languages |
Population mid-2000 (millions) |
Angola | 41 | 33 | 12.878 |
Botswana | 30 | 8 | 1.576 |
Burundi | 3 | 2 | 6.054 |
Cameroon | 286 | 46 | 15.422 |
Central African Republic | 68 | 8 | 3.513 |
Comoros | 4 | 2 | 0.578 |
Congo-Brazzaville | 60 | 51 | 2.831 |
Congo-Kinshasa | 221 | 156 | 51.965 |
Equatorial Guinea | 12 | 8 | 0.453 |
Gabon | 40 | 38 | 1.226 |
Kenya | 61 | 27 | 30.340 |
Lesotho | 4 | 2 | 2.143 |
Malawi | 15 | 12 | 10.385 |
Mozambique | 33 | 32 | 19.105 |
Namibia | 28 | 16 | 1.771 |
Rwanda | 3 | 2 | 7.229 |
South Africa | 31 | 13 | 43.421 |
Swaziland | 4 | 3 | 1.004 |
Tanzania | 132 | 107 | 35.306 |
Uganda | 47 | 20 | 23.318 |
Zambia | 41 | 34 | 9.582 |
Zimbabwe | 19 | 14 | 11.343 |
NB: I have not included Somalia neither Sudan as their Bantu communities are really tiny.
The population of all those countries adds up to 291 millions. By saying that the speakers of a Bantu language are 220 millions, I then assume that about 75% of the people in that area are Bantu speakers. This assumption is quite reasonable if we keep in mind that probably only Central African Republic, Cameroon, and Kenya have a lower percentage, while I underestimate the situation of almost all the other countries listed above. It is not worth totalizing the numbers of languages in the second column (1183) and in the third one (634), because languages spoken in several countries would be counted more than once (especially in the second column, with French and English for instance). Furthermore, half of the languages can be Bantu without representing half of the population.
|
|