query: instance_of nguni languages
supports: The Highveld is the portion of the South African inland plateau which has an altitude above roughly 1500 m, but below 2100 m, thus excluding the Lesotho mountain regions to the south-east of the Highveld. It is home to some of the country's most important commercial farming areas, as well as its largest concentration of metropolitan centres, especially the Gauteng conurbation, which accommodates one-third of South Africa's population. Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west; Chad to the northeast; the Central African Republic to the east; and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo to the south. Cameroon's coastline lies on the Bight of Bonny, part of the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean. Mpumalanga (name changed from Eastern Transvaal on 24 August 1995), is a province of South Africa. The name means "east", or literally "the place where the sun rises" in the Swazi, Xhosa, Ndebele and Zulu languages. Mpumalanga lies in eastern South Africa, bordering Swaziland and Mozambique. It constitutes 6.5% of South Africa's land area. It shares borders with the South African provinces of Limpopo to the north, Gauteng to the west, the Free State to the southwest, and KwaZulu-Natal to the south. The capital is Nelspruit. Before 1994, Mpumalanga was part of Transvaal Province. The Nguni cattle breed is special to southern Africa. A hybrid of different Indian and later European cattle breeds, they were introduced by Bantu-speaking tribes to southern Africa during their migration from the north of the continent. The cattle breed is medium-sized and adapted to grazing on the highveld. Central Africa is a core region of the African continent which includes Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda. Middle Africa (as used by the United Nations when categorising geographic subregions) is an analogous term that includes Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and São Tomé and Príncipe. All of the states in the UN subregion of Middle Africa, plus those otherwise commonly reckoned in Central Africa (11 states in total), constitute the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS). Since its independence in 2011, South Sudan has also been commonly included in the region. Swaziland, officially the Kingdom of Swaziland (or ; Swazi: "Umbuso weSwatini"; sometimes called kaNgwane or Eswatini), is a sovereign state in Southern Africa. It is neighboured by Mozambique to its northeast and by South Africa to its north, west and south. The country and its people take their names from Mswati II, the 19th-century king under whose rule Swazi territory was expanded and unified. Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most-populous continent. At about 30.3 million km² (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area and 20.4 % of its total land area. With 1.1 billion people as of 2013, it accounts for about 15% of the world's human population. The continent is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, both the Suez Canal and the Red Sea along the Sinai Peninsula to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. The continent includes Madagascar and various archipelagos. It contains 54 fully recognized sovereign states (countries), nine territories and two "de facto" independent states with limited or no recognition. Southern Africa is the southernmost region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics, and including several countries.
  The term "southern Africa" or "Southern Africa", generally includes Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. From a political perspective the region is said to be unipolar with South Africa as a first regional power. The Nguni languages are a group of Bantu languages spoken in southern Africa by the Nguni people . Nguni languages include Xhosa , Zulu , Swati , Hlubi , Phuthi , Bhaca , Lala , Nhlangwini and the three languages called Ndebele : Southern Transvaal Ndebele , Northern Ndebele and Sumayela Ndebele ( the latter sometimes also being referred to as `` Northern Ndebele '' ) . The appellation `` Nguni '' derives from the Nguni cattle type . Ngoni ( see below ) is an older , or a shifted , variant . It is sometimes argued that use of Nguni as a generic label suggests a historical monolithic unity of the peoples in question , where in fact the situation may have been more complex . The linguistic use of the label ( referring to a subgrouping of the Bantu languages ) is relatively stable . Shaka kaSenzangakhona (circa 1787  22 September 1828), also known as Shaka Zulu, was one of the most influential monarchs of the Zulu Kingdom. Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web-based publication that contains statistics for 7,457 languages in its 19th edition, which was released in 2016. Of these, 7,097 are listed as living and 360 are listed as extinct. "Ethnologue" provides information on the number of speakers, location, dialects, linguistic affiliations, availability of the Bible in each language and dialect described, and an estimate of language viability using the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS). The publication is well respected and widely used by linguists.  In the classification of African languages, Bantoid is a putative branch of the BenueCongo branch of the NigerCongo family. The term 'Bantoid' was first used by Krause in 1895 for languages that showed resemblances in vocabulary to Bantu. Greenberg in his 1963 "The Languages of Africa" 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. The Bantoid languages probably do not actually form a coherent group. Nguni people are a group of people who primarily speak Nguni languages and currently reside predominantly in Southern Africa. The Nguni people are Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and Swazi people. They predominantly live in South Africa. Swazi people live in both South Africa and Swaziland. In South Africa, the historic Nguni kingdoms of the Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and Swazi lie on the present provinces of the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and Gauteng. The most notable of these kingdoms is the Zulu Kingdom which was ruled by Shaka Zulu, a powerful warrior king whose conquest took place in the early nineteenth century. The NigerCongo 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 is complicated by ambiguity about what constitutes a distinct language. KwaZulu-Natal (also referred to as KZN and known as "the garden province") is a province of South Africa that was created in 1994 when the Zulu bantustan of KwaZulu ("Place of the Zulu" in Zulu) and Natal Province were merged. It is located in the southeast of the country, enjoying a long shoreline beside the Indian Ocean and sharing borders with three other provinces and the countries of Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho. Its capital is Pietermaritzburg and its largest city is Durban. It is the 2nd most populous province in South Africa, with slightly fewer residents than Gauteng. In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is generally used as the most important criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used. The Bantu languages, technically the Narrow Bantu languages (as opposed to "Wide Bantu", a loosely defined categorization which includes other Bantoid languages), constitute a traditional branch of the NigerCongo 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. Bantu languages are spoken largely east and south of present-day Cameroon, that is, in the regions commonly known as Central Africa, Southeast Africa, and Southern Africa. Parts of the Bantu area include languages from other language families (see map). The Eastern Cape is a province of South Africa. Its capital is Bhisho, but its two largest cities are Port Elizabeth and East London. It was formed in 1994 out of the Xhosa homelands of Transkei and Ciskei, together with the eastern portion of the Cape Province. Landing place and home of the 1820 settlers, the central and eastern part of the province is the traditional home of the Xhosa people. This region is the birthplace of many prominent South African politicians, such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Chris Hani, Thabo Mbeki, Steve Biko, Bantu Holomisa and Charles Coghlan. Gauteng, which means "place of gold", is one of the nine provinces of South Africa. It was formed from part of the old Transvaal Province after South Africa's first all-race elections on 27 April 1994. It was initially named PretoriaWitwatersrandVereeniging (PWV) and was renamed "Gauteng" in December 1994. South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded on the south by of coastline of Southern Africa stretching along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, on the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, and on the east and northeast by Mozambique and Swaziland, and surrounding the kingdom of Lesotho. South Africa is the 25th-largest country in the world by land area, and with close to 56 million people, is the world's 24th-most populous nation. It is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World or the Eastern Hemisphere. It is the only country that borders both the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean. About 80 percent of South Africans are of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, divided among a variety of ethnic groups speaking different Bantu languages, nine of which have official status. The remaining population consists of Africa's largest communities of European (white), Asian (Indian), and multiracial (coloured) ancestry.
candidates: 1 area branch cape capital categorization cattle cattle breed city classification community continent country criterion day december family garden geographical group gulf home hybrid information language language family may metropolitan mountain name nine number ocean part people perspective plateau population port province publication region relationship republic rule sea sense september sharing sovereign state square state statistics status surface term territory three two variety
answer: language family