Nambya language

Nambya
Nanzva
Native to	Zimbabwe, Botswana
Ethnicity	Nambya people
Native speakers	(100,000 cited 2000–2004) [1]
Language family	Niger–Congo? Atlantic–Congo Volta-Congo Benue–Congo Bantoid Southern Bantoid Bantu Shona languages Kalanga-Nyamba Nambya
Official status
Official language in	Zimbabwe (both Kalanga and Nambya)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	nmq  – Nambya
Glottolog	namb1291
ELP	Nambya

Nambya, Nambiya or Nanzwa/Nanzva, is a Bantu language spoken by the Nambya people. ^[2] It is spoken in northwestern Zimbabwe, particularly in the town of Hwange, ^{[3] [4]} with a few speakers in northeastern Botswana. It is either classified as a dialect of Kalanga or as a closely related language. ^[5] The Zimbabwean constitution, in particular the Education Act, as amended in 1990, recognises Nambya and Kalanga as separate indigenous languages. ^[5]

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. ^[5]

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e		o
Open		a

Morphology

Like many Bantu languages, Nambya has a highly agglutinative morphology. ^[5]

References

1. Nambya at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
2. Hayes, M. E. (1977). "The Nambiya people of Wange". Nada: The Southern Rhodesia Native Affairs Department Annual. 11 (4): 385–393. Retrieved 14 August 2025.
3. Ndhlovu, Finex (1 January 2009). The Politics of Language and Nation Building in Zimbabwe. Peter Lang. p. 54. ISBN   9783039119424.
4. 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.
5. 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.