Bantu languages and population


Click here for the status of Bantu languages.

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.

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Last Modified: Saturday, 07-Jul-2007 20:00:34 CEST  http://www.bantu-languages.com/