Ndonga | |
---|---|
ndonga | |
Native to | Namibia and southern Angola |
Region | Ovamboland |
Native speakers | 810,000 (2006) [1] |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-1 | ng |
ISO 639-2 | ndo |
ISO 639-3 | ndo |
Glottolog | ndon1254 |
R.22 [2] | |
Linguasphere | 99-AUR-lc |
Ndonga, also called Oshindonga, is a Bantu dialect spoken in Namibia and parts of Angola. It is a standardized dialect of the Ovambo language, and is mutually intelligible with Kwanyama, the other Ovambo dialect with a standard written form. With 810,000 speakers, the language has the largest number of speakers in Namibia.
Martti Rautanen translated the Bible into the Ndonga dialect. Beginning his work in 1885, he published the New Testament in 1903, but it took until 1920 to finish the Old Testament. His Bible translation became the basis of a standardized form of Ndonga. [3]
Oshindonga uses a five-vowel system:
Front | Back | |
---|---|---|
Close | i | u |
Mid | e | o |
Open | a |
Oshindonga contains the following consonant phonemes:
Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nasal | voiceless | m̥ | n̥ | ŋ̊ | |||
voiced | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | |||
Plosive | voiceless | p | t | k | ʔ | ||
voiced | b | d | g | ||||
affricate | ts | ||||||
Fricative | voiceless | f | θ | s | ʃ | x | h |
voiced | v | ð | z | ʒ | ɣ | ||
Approximant | central | w | j | ||||
lateral | l |
Prenasalized sounds are listed below:
Oshindonga also contains many other consonant compounds, listed below:
In phonology, an allophone is one of multiple possible spoken sounds – or phones – used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive and the aspirated form are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Central Thai. Similarly, in Spanish, and are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English.
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.
A lateral is a consonant in which the airstream proceeds along one or both of the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is the English L, as in Larry. Lateral consonants contrast with central consonants, in which the airstream flows through the center of the mouth.
In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some languages have glottalized sonorants with creaky voice that pattern with ejectives phonologically, and other languages have ejectives that pattern with implosives, which has led to phonologists positing a phonological class of glottalic consonants, which includes ejectives.
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme, or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot refers to the glyphs "combining dot above", and "combining dot below" which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in a variety of languages. Similar marks are used with other scripts.
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A voiceless alveolar affricate is a type of affricate consonant pronounced with the tip or blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge just behind the teeth. This refers to a class of sounds, not a single sound. There are several types with significant perceptual differences:
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