Bantu Tone

There are roughly 500 Bantu languages, spoken in Africa south of a line going from Cameroon, in the west, to southern Somalia, in the east. It is a large language family both in terms of number of languages and in terms of number of speakers: roughly 240 million Africans speak Bantu languages, and several of the more well‐known Bantu languages – like Swahili, Kikuyu, Zulu, or Kongo – have a few million speakers each (Nurse and Philippson 2003a).