The Bantu languages form a large category of African languages.

Bantu also is used as a general label for 300-600 ethnic groups in Africa of speakers of Bantu languages, distributed from Cameroon east across Central Africa and Eastern Africa to Southern Africa.

The Bantu family is fragmented into hundreds of individual groups, none of them larger than a few million people (the largest being the Zulu with some 10 million).

Swahili is a Bantu language with only 5-10 million native speakers but of super-regional importance as tens of millions are fluent second language speakers.