Bantu

The Bantu languages are spoken across most of Africa south of the equator, from Cameroon and Kenya in the north to South Africa in the south, in more than 20 countries.
Bantu is not a single language but a large group of about 500 related languages within the Niger-Congo family, spoken by over 350 million people. The best known include Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa, Shona, Kinyarwanda, Kikongo, and Lingala. The Bantu languages spread from a homeland near the border of modern Nigeria and Cameroon beginning about 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. They share a characteristic system of noun classes marked by prefixes; for example, in Swahili mtu means "person" and watu "people." The word Bantu itself means "people" in many of these languages.