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One stem, many words: the Bantu noun equation.

Every Bantu noun is built the same way — an optional augment, a class prefix, and a stem. Change the prefix and the meaning moves.

NOUN = (augment) + class prefix + stem
O·lu·ganda
the language
class 11
/oluɡaːnda/
O·mu·ganda
a person
class 1
/omuɡaːnda/
A·ba·ganda
the people
class 2
/abaɡaːnda/
Bu·ganda
the land
class 14
/buɡaːnda/

One stem, ganda — the beginning changes and the meaning moves from the language to a person, the people and the land.

Why the language's own name shows it

A Bantu language names itself, a person, the people and their land from one stem. The stem stays; the class prefix changes. In Luganda, ganda takes lu- for the language, mu- for a person, ba- for the people and bu- for the land. Every language page in this directory opens with that family, split into its parts wherever the registry's parts add up to the written name.

Where a name is shown whole, the sounds have merged in speech — u + mu + zulu is said Umzulu. We show the name as it is written rather than invent a split.

The classes these names use

Class 1
a person — in 498 languages here
Class 2
the people — in 494 languages here
Class 14
the land — in 372 languages here
Class 7
the language's name — in 310 languages here
Class 5
the language's name — in 44 languages here
Class 11
the language's name — in 39 languages here

Found on the map

Some lands are known to the world by the equation itself — the land's name in the language is the country's name.

Lesotho
Le + sotho — from Southern Sotho
Botswana
Bo + tswana — from Tswana

Tested at scale

The equation is not a teaching device only. The BantuNomics Noun Lab tests every noun paradigm in its corpus against it — see the Noun Lab and the equations registry (BTS-E100).

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