Maʼa is 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. T ...

of Tanzania. The Mbugu people speak two divergent registers, which have been treated as separate languages by some authorities (e.g. Tucker and Bryan): Mbugu or "Normal Mbugu" (autonym kiMbugu) is purely Bantu, with vocabulary closely related to

Pare Pare may refer to: People with the name * Emmett Paré (1907-1973), tennis player * Pare, former member of Kotak, an Indonesian band * Pare Lorentz (1905-1992), American film director * Richard Pare (born 1948), English photographer * Paré, a ...

, while Maʼa or "Inner Mbugu" (autonym kiMaʼa) consists of an inherited

Cushitic The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken primarily in the Horn of Africa, with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and the Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As o ...

vocabulary with

Bantu Bantu may refer to: *Bantu languages, constitute the largest sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages *Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of Africa speaking a Bantu language *Bantu knots, a type of African hairstyle *Black Association for Nationali ...

morphology similar to that of Shambala and Pare. They share a grammar, to the point that their syntax is identical and a passage in one can be translated to the other simply by changing the

content word Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach, nouns were said to name objects and other entities, lexical verbs to indicate acti ...

s. The Cushitic element was identified as

South Cushitic The South Cushitic or Rift languages of Tanzania are a branch of the Cushitic languages. The most numerous is Iraqw, with half a million speakers. These languages are believed to have been originally spoken by Southern Cushitic agro-pastoralists ...

by Ehret. However, Kießling (2001) notes a large

East Cushitic The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken primarily in the Horn of Africa, with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and the Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As o ...

admixture. Mous presents the Cushitic element as a register of a Bantu language, and identifies it as largely East Cushitic rather than South Cushitic.Blench, 2006
Classification of Afroasiatic
ms.

Phonology

Consonants

Normal Mbugu distinguishes 29 consonants. Inner Mbugu distinguishes an additional four: /ʔ ɬ x ^ŋ̊x/, for a total of 33. The table below displays the consonants of Mbugu in IPA format, along with Mous' (1995) practical orthography in angle brackets where it differs from IPA.

Vowels

Both registers of Mbugu distinguish five vowels.

Tone

Three tones are distinguished in Mbugu: high, low, and falling. Low tone is default (unmarked). High tone is represented with an acute accent , while falling tone is represented with the sequence .

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Tone

References

Further reading