Mama

Mama(s) or Mamma(s) may refer to:

Roles

Places

Anatomy

Art, entertainment, and media

Fictional characters

Mama (Vitas album)

Mama (Мама, sometimes translated Mother or Mom) is a Russian album by Vitas. It was released in 2003, simultaneously with The Songs of My Mother. Both albums were a tribute to his late mother. Songs from these albums featured heavily in the setlist of Vitas' extensive world tour The Songs of My Mother, performed at hundreds of venues in several countries from 2004-2006.

The opening track, The Star won a Russian People's HIT prize in 2003 and is one of Vitas' most popular songs worldwide. Like Opera No. 2, it is still a staple of Vitas' live performances. Vitas sang the song as a duet with Alexander Kireev for his entry into the Star Factory in 2006.

He performed the song Starry River accompanied by its composer Aleksandra Pakhmutova on piano at a concert in honour of the composer.

He covered the song The Unknown Friend Song (Песня о неизвестном друге, also known as Extraterrestrial Friend) composed in 1985 by Aleksandra Pakhmutova and Rasul Gamzatov (the poem is translated by Yunna Morits) for the song cycle The Earth Globe (Шар земной, 1985–1987). The song is about an unknown friend that realizes that there is an unknown circle of "invisible and unknown" friends and enemies, as well as "lovable planets" (as per the lyrics), in addition to interstellar and general awareness, brotherhood to the next and an existence of an extraplanetary cycle. (The song addresses the topic of science fiction: brotherhood for humanity in the 3rd millennium and beyond.) It is also subsequently re-edited on Vitas' 2006 CD Return Home. There's also the music score of the song (available on the composer's website) to download. In concert, Vitas often dons an alien robot costume while performing this song.

Mama (Vladimir Arzumanyan song)

"Mama" (Armenian: Մամա, English: Mom) is a song recorded by Armenian pre-teen singer Vladimir Arzumanyan. It won for Armenia in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2010, held in Minsk, Belarus scoring 120 points.

References

Bantu languages

The Bantu languages (/ˈbæntuː/), technically the Narrow Bantu languages, constitute a traditional branch of the Niger–Congo 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; i.e. 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 Bantu language with the largest total number of speakers is Swahili; however, the majority of its speakers know it as a second language. According to Ethnologue, there are over 180 million L2 (second-language) speakers, but only about 2 million native speakers.

According to Ethnologue, Shona is the most widely spoken as a first language, with 10.8 million speakers (or 14.2 million if Manyika and Ndau are included), followed closely by Zulu, with 10.3 million. Ethnologue separates the largely mutually intelligible Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, but, if grouped together, they have 12.4 million speakers.

Bantu peoples

Bantu peoples is used as a general label for the 300–600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak Bantu languages. They inhabit a geographical area stretching east and southward from Central Africa across the African Great Lakes region down to Southern Africa. Bantu is a major branch of the Niger-Congo language family spoken by most populations in Africa. There are about 650 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages.

About 3000 years ago, speakers of the proto-Bantu language group began a millennia-long series of migrations eastward from their homeland between West Africa and Central Africa at the border of eastern Nigeria and Cameroon. This Bantu expansion first introduced Bantu peoples to central, southern, and southeastern Africa, regions they had previously been absent from. The proto-Bantu migrants in the process assimilated and/or displaced a number of earlier inhabitants that they came across, including Khoisan populations in the south and Afro-Asiatic groups in the southeast.