Bantoid languages
Encyclopedia
In the classification of African languages
African languages
There are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...

, Bantoid is a branch of the Benue–Congo subfamily of the Niger–Congo
Niger–Congo languages
The Niger–Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. They may constitute the world's largest language family in terms of distinct languages, although this question...

 phylum. The term 'Bantoid' was first used by Krause in 1895 for languages that showed resemblances in vocabulary to Bantu
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...

. Greenberg in his 1963 The Languages of Africa
The Languages of Africa
The Languages of Africa is a 1963 book of essays by Joseph Greenberg, in which he sets forth a genetic classification of African languages that, with some changes, continues to be the most commonly used one today...

defined Bantoid as the group to which (Narrow) Bantu belongs together with its closest relatives; this is the sense in which the term is still used today.

A proposal that divided Bantoid into North and South Bantoid
Southern Bantoid languages
In the classification of African languages, Southern Bantoid , also known as Wide Bantu or Bin, is a branch of the Bantoid languages of the Niger–Congo phylum...

 was introduced in Williamson (1989, based on work presented in Blench [1987]). In this proposal, the Mambiloid and Dakoid languages
Dakoid languages
The Dakoid languages are a small putative group of languages spoken in Taraba and Adamawa states of eastern Nigeria:*Gaa–Dong**Donga **Tiba *Daka–Taram**Taram**Daka ....

 are grouped together as North Bantoid, while everything else Bantoid is subsumed under South Bantoid; the Ethnologue
Ethnologue
Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christian linguistic service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, to provide the speakers with Bibles in their native language and support their efforts in language development.The Ethnologue...

 uses this classification. The legitimacy of the North Bantoid group is questionable, and the Dakoid languages are often now placed outside of Bantoid, but the work did establish Southern Bantoid as a valid genetic unit. Southern Bantoid includes the well known and numerous Bantu
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...

subfamily.

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