Bantu is used as a general label for the 300–600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak Bantu languages, distributed from Cameroon east across Central Africa and Eastern Africa to Southern Africa. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility,Derek Nurse, 2006, "Bantu Languages", in the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages.