[11] The term Bantu as a name for the group was not coined but "noticed" or "identified" (as Bâ-ntu) by Wilhelm Bleek as the first European in 1857 or 1858, and popularized in his Comparative Grammar of 1862.

[13] The term narrow Bantu, excluding those languages classified as Bantoid by Malcolm Guthrie (1948), was introduced in the 1960s.

The word kintu exists in some places, but it means "thing", with no relation to the concept of "language".

[15] In addition, delegates at the African Languages Association of Southern Africa conference in 1984 reported that, in some places, the term Kintu has a derogatory significance.

[19] Within the fierce debate among linguists about the word "Bantu", Seidensticker (2024) indicates that there has been a "profound conceptual trend in which a "purely technical [term] without any non-linguistic connotations was transformed into a designation referring indiscriminately to language, culture, society, and race".

[23] The technical term Bantu, meaning "human beings" or simply "people", was first used by Wilhelm Bleek (1827–1875), as the concept is reflected in many of the languages of this group.

A common characteristic of Bantu languages is that they use words such as muntu or mutu for "human being" or in simplistic terms "person", and the plural prefix for human nouns starting with mu- (class 1) in most languages is ba- (class 2), thus giving bantu for "people".

Bleek, and later Carl Meinhof, pursued extensive studies comparing the grammatical structures of Bantu languages.

the distinctiveness of Narrow Bantu as opposed to the other Southern Bantoid languages has been called into doubt,[25] but the term is still widely used.

Another attempt at a detailed genetic classification to replace the Guthrie system is the 1999 "Tervuren" proposal of Bastin, Coupez, and Mann.

[27] However, it relies on lexicostatistics, which, because of its reliance on overall similarity rather than shared innovations, may predict spurious groups of conservative languages that are not closely related.

Nurse & Philippson (2006) evaluate many proposals for low-level groups of Bantu languages, but the result is not a complete portrayal of the family.

[28] The languages that share Dahl's law may also form a valid group, Northeast Bantu.

[37] In Swahili, for example, Kitoto kidogo kimekisoma (for comparison, Kamwana kadoko karikuverenga in Shona language) means 'The small child has read it [a book]'.

[39] The morphological shape of Bantu words is typically CV, VCV, CVCV, VCVCV, etc.

An example from Chewa: the word "school", borrowed from English, and then transformed to fit the sound patterns of this language, is sukulu.

Reduplication is a common morphological phenomenon in Bantu languages and is usually used to indicate frequency or intensity of the action signalled by the (unreduplicated) verb stem.

In a few cases prefixes are used to distinguish languages with the same root in their name, such as Tshiluba and Kiluba (both Luba), Umbundu and Kimbundu (both Mbundu).

The prefixless form typically does not occur in the language itself, but is the basis for other words based on the ethnicity.

[citation needed] A case has been made out for borrowings of many place-names and even misremembered rhymes – chiefly from one of the Luba varieties – in the USA.