Zambian Braille

Zambian Braille;
Type	alphabet
Languages	Bemba, Chewa, Kaonde, Lozi, Lunda, Luvale, Tonga
Parent systems	Braille English Braille Zambian Braille; ;
Print basis	Bemba alphabet

Last updated March 19, 2019

Zambian Braille is any of several braille alphabets of Zambia. It has been developed for the languages Bemba, Chewa, Lozi, Kaonde, Lunda, Luvale, and Tonga.

Braille is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired. It is traditionally written with embossed paper. Braille users can read computer screens and other electronic supports using refreshable braille displays. They can write braille with the original slate and stylus or type it on a braille writer, such as a portable braille notetaker or computer that prints with a braille embosser.

The Bemba language, ChiBemba, is a major Bantu language spoken primarily in north-eastern Zambia by the Bemba people and as a lingua franca by about 18 related ethnic groups, including the Bisa people of Mpika and Lake Bangweulu, and to a lesser extent in Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, and Botswana. Including all its dialects, Bemba is the most spoken indigenous language in Zambia. The Lamba language is closely related and some people consider it a dialect of Bemba.

Chewa, also known as Nyanja, is a language of the Bantu language family. The noun class prefix chi- is used for languages, so the language is usually called Chichewa and Chinyanja. In Malawi, the name was officially changed from Chinyanja to Chichewa in 1968 at the insistence of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, and this is still the name most commonly used in Malawi today. In Zambia, the language is generally known as Nyanja or Cinyanja/Chinyanja '(language) of the lake'.

It is based on the 26 letters of the basic braille alphabet used for Grade-1 English Braille, so the print digraph ch is written as a digraph ⠉⠓ in braille as well. The letter ñ/ŋ[ŋ] of several of the print alphabets is distinguished from the sequence ng[ŋɡ] with an apostrophe: ⠝⠛⠄ñ, as in the equivalent ng’ of print Bemba. The various alphabets, including digraphs that occur in any one of them, can thus be summarized as:

English Braille, also known as Grade 2 Braille, is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of 250 or so letters (phonograms), numerals, punctuation, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations (logograms). Some English Braille letters, such as ⠡ ⟨ch⟩, correspond to more than one letter in print.

a	b	bb	c	cc		ch		d	e	f
g	h	hh	i	j	k	kh		kk		l
m	n	ñ, ŋ, ng’		o	p	ph		q	r	s
sh		th	t	u	v	w	x	y	z

Bemba has the basic alphabet plus ng’, sh, and in some orthographies ch in place of c. Chewa (Nyanja) has ch; Lozi, Lunda and Kaonde have ch, sh, and ñ; Luvale has ch, sh, ph, kh, th; and Tonga has ch, sh, bb, cc, hh, kk, and ŋ.

Numbers and punctuation are as in traditional English Braille.

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Lozi, also known as siLozi and Rozi, is a Bantu language of the Niger–Congo language family within the Sotho–Tswana branch of Zone S (S.30), that is spoken by the Lozi people, primarily in southwestern Zambia and in surrounding countries. This language is most closely related to Northern Sotho, Tswana (Setswana), Kgalagari (SheKgalagari) and Sotho. Lozi and its dialects are spoken and understood by approximately six percent of the population of Zambia. Silozi is the endonym as defined by the United Nations. Lozi is the exonym.

Solwezi is the capital of the North-Western Province of Zambia. Solwezi town has approximately 260,000 inhabitants at an elevation of 1235 m above sea level. Kaonde is the largest tribe represented in Solwezi, in addition to large numbers of Lunda and Luvale speaking people.

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Eng or engma is a letter of the Latin alphabet, used to represent a velar nasal in the written form of some languages and in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Zambia has several major indigenous languages, all of them members of the Bantu family. English is the official language and the major language of business and education.

Tibetan Braille is the braille alphabet for writing the Tibetan language. It was invented in 1992 by German socialworker Sabriye Tenberken. It is based on German braille, with some extensions from international usage. As in print, the vowel a is not written.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Zambia:

Zambia, officially known as the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. The neighbouring countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Tanzania to the north-east, Malawi to the east, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia to the south, and Angola to the west. The capital city is Lusaka, located in the southeast of the country. The population is concentrated mainly around the capital and the Copperbelt to the northwest.

The 'Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation' (ZNBC) is a Zambian television and radio station, formerly state owned, now owned by Zambians. It is the oldest, widest and largest radio and television service provider in Zambia It was established by an Act of Parliament in 1987, which was passed to transform the Zambia Broadcasting Services from being a Government Department under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Services into a statutory body called the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation.

The goal of braille uniformity is to unify the braille alphabets of the world as much as possible, so that literacy in one braille alphabet readily transfers to another. Unification was first achieved by a convention of the International Congress on Work for the Blind in 1878, where it was decided to replace the mutually incompatible national conventions of the time with the French values of the basic Latin alphabet, both for languages which use Latin-based alphabets and, through their Latin equivalents, for languages which use other scripts. However, the unification did not address letters beyond these 26, leaving French and German Braille partially incompatible, and as braille spread to new languages with new needs, national conventions again became disparate. A second round of unification was undertaken under the auspices of UNESCO in 1951, setting the foundation for international braille usage today.

Māori Braille is the braille alphabet of the Māori language. It takes the letter wh from English Braille, and has an additional letter to mark long vowels. When Unified English Braille was adopted by New Zealand, it was determined that Māori Braille was compatible, and would continue to be used unchanged.

Welsh Braille is the braille alphabet of the Welsh language. It uses one of the Grade-1 ¹⁄₂ shortcuts of English Braille, ⠡ch, but otherwise print digraphs in the Welsh alphabet are digraphs in braille as well:

Guarani Braille is the braille alphabet of the Paraguayan Guarani language. Letter assignments are those of Spanish Braille : that is, the basic braille alphabet plus ⠻ for ñ. An additional letter, ⠒, is used for glottal stop, written as an apostrophe in the Guarani print alphabet. Print digraphs such as ch and rr are digraphs in braille as well. In addition, the tilde in print is written as the letter ⠱ in braille, and comes before the letter it appears on in print. Thus the Guarani letters outside the basic Latin alphabet are:

Iñupiaq Braille is a braille alphabet of the Inupiat language maintained by the Alaskan Department of Education.

Philippine Braille, or Filipino Braille, is the braille alphabet of the Philippines. Besides Filipino (Tagalog), essentially the same alphabet is used for Ilocano, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, and Bicol.

References

UNESCO (2013) World Braille Usage, 3rd edition.

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