The Bantu language family comprises over 450 languages spoken across most of sub-Saharan Africa south of about 5° North. It belongs to the Niger-Kordofanian phylum (a maximal group of related languages), whose other languages are found mostly in West Africa. The languages spoken in the northwest of the Bantu-speaking region are the most divergent in their vocabulary from other Bantu languages, suggesting that Bantu originated there. The level of diversity within the Bantu languages compared with that of languages for which there are longer historical records, such as Latin and French, suggests that they began to diverge around 5000 years ago.