The Lungu people (also known as Rungu or Tabwa) are a Bantu ethnic group living primarily on the southwestern shores of

Lake Tanganyika Lake Tanganyika () is an African Great Lake. It is the second-oldest freshwater lake in the world, the second-largest by volume, and the second-deepest, in all cases after Lake Baikal in Siberia. It is the world's longest freshwater lake. T ...

, on the Marungu massif in eastern

Democratic Republic of the Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (french: République démocratique du Congo (RDC), colloquially "La RDC" ), informally Congo-Kinshasa, DR Congo, the DRC, the DROC, or the Congo, and formerly and also colloquially Zaire, is a country in ...

, and in southwestern

Tanzania Tanzania (; ), officially the United Republic of Tanzania ( sw, Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It borders Uganda to the north; Kenya to the northeast; Comoro Islands ...

and northeastern

Zambia Zambia (), officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central, Southern and East Africa, although it is typically referred to as being in Southern Africa at its most central point. Its neighbours are t ...

. They speak dialects of the

Mambwe-Lungu language The Mambwe and Lungu peoples living at the southern end of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania and Zambia speak a common language with minor dialectical differences. Perhaps half of the Fipa people The Fipa (or Wafipa) are a Bantu ethno-linguistic ...

, a

Bantu language The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The t ...

. Lungu people comprise several clans and many subclans based on matrilineal descent, some with their own dialects, which are depicted as separate tribes on older ethnographic maps. PeopleGroups.org reports a population of 851,359 Lungu in the

in 1999. In 1987 the Rungu population in Tanzania was estimated to number 34,000. The number of Rungu in Zambia has not been independently estimated, though the combined number of Mambwe and Rungu in Zambia was estimated to be 262,800 in 199

References

''Tabwa'', Encyclopædia Britannica

University of Iowa article
Ethnic groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Ethnic groups in Tanzania Ethnic groups in Zambia Democratic Republic of the Congo–Zambia relations {{tanzania-ethno-group-stub