Source — Wiktionary, "ubuntu"
- Title: ubuntu
- Publication: English Wiktionary
- URL: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ubuntu
- Accessed: 2026-09-02
- Type: primary for the Zulu- and Xhosa-language entries on the same page (a crowdsourced but citation-disciplined lexicographic source, per this project's standing treatment of Wiktionary); tertiary for the English-language entry, which is itself a report of the loaned concept.
Extract
English (noun, uncountable): "a Nguni Bantu ideology focusing on people's allegiances and relations with each other" (glossed as South African English usage). Etymology given as a loanword "from Zulu ubuntu ('humanity') and Xhosa ubuntu ('humaneness, solidarity'), from Proto-Bantu *bʊ̀ntʊ̀."
Zulu ubuntu (noun, class 14): "inherited from Proto-Bantu *bʊ̀ntʊ̀." Definitions given: "humanity, the human race"; "humanity, human nature"; "humaneness, solidarity"; also cross-referenced to the English philosophical-concept sense above.
Xhosa ubuntu (noun, class 14): same Proto-Bantu etymology; definition "humaneness, solidarity."
Portuguese ubuntu (noun, masculine, uncountable): defined as a political term referring to the South African ideological concept — i.e., itself a loanword from English/Nguni, not a native Portuguese coinage, a different relationship to the word than saudade's.
Gaps
- Wiktionary's own "Descendants"/cognate-language apparatus (comparable to what this project used for meraki's Balkan loanword family,
sources/wiktionary-merak-ottoman-turkish.md) was not present or not checked for other Bantu-language cognate entries (botho, hunhu, utu, etc.) on this specific page — those are documented instead viasources/wikipedia-ubuntu-philosophy.mdandsources/iep-ubuntu-hunhu.md, not cross-checked against each language's own Wiktionary entry. - No pronunciation, attestation date, or usage-frequency information was reported from this page.