Question for linguists/linguistics people

[IncognitaIgnorama]

I have tried asking Professor Google, but clearly not able to phrase it in such a way that I am getting an answer: help!

Is there a name/collective noun/designation/whatever it's called for languages which make plurals with prefixes and not suffixes?

(English has boy (s) and boys (pl) with the bit that makes it a plural at the end of the word. Swahili, for example, has mvulana (s) and wavulana (I think.... pl) so the bit that changes as a plural isn't the ending but at the start of the word. See also Arabic. Does this make sense?!)

I have no idea but I’m very interested in the answer!

Yes your question makes sense, sorry I don't know the answer. Will watch the thread!

Phew-glad you guys know what I meant! There surely is a "name" for families of languages like this, right? If not, we'll have to make one up...

I don't know, but if there is a name for them, there also ought to be a name (and maybe there is) for languages that use word endings to indicate all kinds of cases such as nominative, genitive, dative, etc., e.g. Russian.

an agglutinative language perhaps

The answer, if there is one, may be in this paper from 1912, where the author discusses Bantu languages, which form their plural by prefix: www.jstor.org/stable/40444175?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Hello IncognitaIgnorama!
The term you are looking for is Noun class system.
Swahili has an elaborate one referred to as a noun-class concord.

Continued...
Example: Swahili manifests/has a(n elaborate) noun-class system.

Continued...
Swahili looks like a Prefix substantive language

But I don't know if there is a coined term for that.

Thank you, all of you! You've given me plenty to go on, so I am off to do some further investigation based on having actual terms rather than my bad Googling

for all your help!