Nambya, or ''Nanzwa/Nanzva'', is a Bantu language spoken by the Nambya people. It is spoken in northwestern

Zimbabwe Zimbabwe (), officially the Republic of Zimbabwe, is a landlocked country located in Southeast Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers, bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the south-west, Zambia to the north, and ...

, particularly in the town of

Hwange Hwange (formerly Wankie) is a town in Zimbabwe, located in Hwange District, in Matabeleland North Province, in northwestern Zimbabwe, close to the international borders with Botswana and Zambia. It lies approximately , by road, southeast of ...

, with a few speakers in northeastern

Botswana Botswana (, ), officially the Republic of Botswana ( tn, Lefatshe la Botswana, label= Setswana, ), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70 percent of its territory being the Kalaha ...

. It is either classified as a dialect of Kalanga or as a closely related language. The Zimbabwean constitution, in particular the Education Act, as amended in 1990, recognises Nambya and Kalanga as separate indigenous languages.

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 The Southern Bantu languages are a large group of Bantu languages, largely validated in Janson (1991/92).Tore Janson (1991-92) "Southern Bantu and Makua", ''Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika'' (''SUGIA'') Vol. 12/13: 63-106, Rüdiger Köppe Verl ...

Vowels

Morphology

Like many Bantu languages, Nambya has a highly

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...

morphology.

References

Languages of Zimbabwe Languages of Botswana Shona languages {{Bantu-lang-stub