BANTU

Bantu

(adjective) of or relating to the African people who speak one of the Bantoid languages or to their culture; “the Bantu population of Sierra Leone”

Bantu, Bantoid language

(noun) a family of languages widely spoken in the southern half of the African continent

Bantu

(noun) a member of any of a large number of linguistically related peoples of Central and South Africa

Source: WordNet® 3.1

Etymology

Noun

Bantu (countable and uncountable, plural Bantus or Bantu)

(countable) A member of any of the African ethnic groups that speak a Bantu language.

(South Africa, dated, now offensive) A black South African.

(uncountable) The largest African language family of the Niger-Congo group, spoken in much of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Usage notes

Black South Africans were at times officially called "Bantus" by the Apartheid regime. New legislation and documents from the South African government have replaced "Bantu" with "Black" due to the former word's derogatory connotations. Outside Southern Africa the term is still widely used as a term for the Bantu-speaking peoples.

Anagrams

• tabun

Source: Wiktionary

Ban"tu, n.

Definition: A member of one of the great family of Negroid tribes occupying equatorial and southern Africa. These tribes include, as important divisions, the Kafirs, Damaras, Bechuanas, and many tribes whose names begin with Aba-, Ama-, Ba-, Ma-, Wa-, variants of the Bantu plural personal prefix Aba-, as in Ba-ntu, or Aba-ntu, itself a combination of this prefix with the syllable -ntu, a person. -- Ban"tu, a.

Source: Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary 1913 Edition