Just like members of a human family often share certain features, like having brown eyes or the same laugh, languages within families have similar traits.
While English's language group, called *Germanic*, includes a few dozen languages, Bantu has several hundred! Bantu languages are spoken by around 350 million people in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Bantu is a group of languages within the Niger-Congo language family-it’s one of the world’s major language families. Zulu joins Swahili as Duolingo’s second Bantu language. Zulu-which is called isiZulu in Zulu itself-is spoken by approximately 12 million people, primarily in South Africa. In the same way that people have immediate family members and more distant relatives, languages can be related and come from an original “ancestor.” For instance, the Indo-European family is a huge group of languages, including some that are more distantly related (like English, Hindi, and Greek) and some that are more closely related (like Spanish and French, which both evolved from Latin). Zulu is part of another important family, too: a language family! Read on to learn more about language families and what makes Zulu unique! So what is a language family, anyway? Sawubona! That’s “hello” in Zulu, our newest language course, and we’re excited to welcome Zulu to the Duolingo family.
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