Kwanyama or Cuanhama is a

national language '' '' A national language is a language (or language variant, e.g. dialect) that has some connection— de facto or de jure—with a nation. The term is applied quite differently in various contexts. One or more languages spoken as first languag ...

Angola Angola, officially the Republic of Angola, is a country on the west-Central Africa, central coast of Southern Africa. It is the second-largest Portuguese-speaking world, Portuguese-speaking (Lusophone) country in both total area and List of c ...

and

Namibia Namibia, officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country on the west coast of Southern Africa. Its borders include the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Angola and Zambia to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south; in the no ...

. It is a standardized dialect of the Ovambo language, and is

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...

with Oshindonga, the other Ovambo dialect with a standard written form. The entire Christian Bible has been translated into Kwanyama and was first published in 1974 under the name ''Ombibeli'' by the South African Bible Society. Jehovah's Witnesses released the modern translation of the

new testament The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...

, the ''New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures'' in Kwanyama in 2019, both printed an
electronic online version

Phonology

/t/ and /d/ are dentalized when followed by a front vowel /i/. An /s/ sound can only occur in loanwords. Tones Kwanyama has two tones : high and low.

Grammar

Verbs

Verbs are inflected for two tenses: present and non-present. There is a mandatory subject concord before verbs, indicating person, tense, and negation. Verbs are divided into two categories, active and stative, each of which have different subject concords. The future tense in active verbs is indicated by inserting the auxiliary ''ka'' after the nonpast subject concord. Another way to negate a verb is to add the prefix ''ha-'' before the verb stem (ex. ''okwiimba'' 'to sing' -> ''okuhaimba'' 'to not sing').

References

Bibliography

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External links