Tongwe (''Sitongwe'') and Bende (''Sibende'') constitute a clade of
Bantu languages coded Zone F.10 in Guthrie's classification. According to Nurse & Philippson (2003),
they form a valid node. Indeed, at 90% lexical similarity they may be dialects of a single language.
References
Bantu languages
{{Bantu-lang-stub