Nambya language

Nambya, or Nanzwa/Nanzva, is a Bantu language spoken by the Nambya people. It is spoken in northwestern Zimbabwe, particularly in the town of Hwange,[2][3] with a few speakers in northeastern Botswana. It is either classified as a dialect of Kalanga or as a closely related language.[4] The Zimbabwean constitution, in particular the Education Act, as amended in 1990, recognises Nambya and Kalanga as separate indigenous languages.[4]

Nambya
Nanzva
Native toZimbabwe, Botswana
EthnicityNambya people
Native speakers
100,000 (2000–2004)[1]
Official status
Official language in
Zimbabwe (both Kalanga and Nambya)
Language codes
ISO 639-3
nmq – Nambya
Glottolognamb1291
ELPNambya

Phonology

Nambya is a tonal language. It has a simple 5 vowel system and a typical Bantu consonant-vowel (CV) syllable structure. The language has onsetless syllables, but these are restricted to the word-initial position, making Nambya typical of the Southern Bantu languages.[4]

Vowels
Front Central Back
Close i u
Mid e o
Open a

Morphology

Like many Bantu languages, Nambya has a highly agglutinative morphology.[4]

References
  1. Nambya at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
  2. Ndhlovu, Finex (1 January 2009). The Politics of Language and Nation Building in Zimbabwe. Peter Lang. p. 54. ISBN 9783039119424.
  3. Kamwangamalu, Nkonko; Baldauf, Richard B. Jr.; Kaplan, Robert B. (8 April 2016). Language Planning in Africa: The Cameroon, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Routledge. p. 220. ISBN 9781134916887.
  4. Kadenge, Maxwell (March 2010). "Some Segmental Phonological Processes Involving Vowels in Nambya: A Preliminary Descriptive Account" (PDF). The Journal of Pan African Studies. 3 (6): 239–252.

Further reading
  • Borland, Colin H. (1984). "Conflicting methodologies of Shona dialect classification". South African Journal of African Languages. 4 (1): 1–12. doi:10.1080/02572117.1984.10586564.
  • Chabata, Emmanuel (2007). The Nambya Verb With Special Emphasis On The Causative (PhD thesis). University of Oslo. OCLC 553889339.
  • Doke, Clement Martyn (1931). A comparative study of Shona phonetics. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press.
  • Hachipola, Simooya Jerome (1998). A Survey of the Minority Languages of Zimbabwe. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications. ISBN 9780908307661. OCLC 42736812.
  • Hasselbring, Sue (2000). A sociolinguistic survey of the languages of Botswana. Sociolinguistic studies of Botswana language series. Vol. 1. Gaborone: Basarwa Languages Project.
  • Kadenge, Maxwell (2006). The Phonology of Nambya (MA thesis). University of Zimbabwe.
  • Moreno, Augustine (1988). Nambya dictionary. Gweru: Mambo Press.
  • Wentzel, Petrus Johannes (1983). Nau dzabaKalanga [A history of the Kalanga]. Vol. 1–3. Pretoria: University of South Africa.


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