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Nambya
Nambya
Nanzva
Native to	Zimbabwe, Botswana
Ethnicity	Nambya people
Native speakers	(100,000 cited 2000–2004)
Language family	Niger–Congo? Atlantic–Congo Volta-Congo Benue–Congo Bantoid Southern Bantoid Bantu Shona languages Kalanga-Nyamba Nambya; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Official status
Official language in	Zimbabwe (both Kalanga and Nambya)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	; nmq – Nambya
Glottolog	namb1291
ELP	Nambya

Nambya, or Nanzwa/Nanzva, is a Bantu language spoken by the Nambya people. It is spoken in northwestern Zimbabwe, particularly in the town of Hwange,^[2]^[3] with a few speakers in northeastern Botswana. It is either classified as a dialect of Kalanga or as a closely related language.^[4] The Zimbabwean constitution, in particular the Education Act, as amended in 1990, recognises Nambya and Kalanga as separate indigenous languages.^[4]

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.^[4]

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e		o
Open		a

Morphology

Like many Bantu languages, Nambya has a highly agglutinative morphology.^[4]

References

^ Nambya at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
^ Ndhlovu, Finex (1 January 2009). The Politics of Language and Nation Building in Zimbabwe. Peter Lang. p. 54. ISBN 9783039119424.
^ Kamwangamalu, Nkonko; Baldauf, Richard B. Jr.; Kaplan, Robert B. (8 April 2016). Language Planning in Africa: The Cameroon, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Routledge. p. 220. ISBN 9781134916887.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Kadenge, Maxwell (March 2010). "Some Segmental Phonological Processes Involving Vowels in Nambya: A Preliminary Descriptive Account" (PDF). The Journal of Pan African Studies. 3 (6): 239–252.

Borland, Colin H. (1984). "Conflicting methodologies of Shona dialect classification". South African Journal of African Languages. 4 (1): 1–12. doi:10.1080/02572117.1984.10586564.
Chabata, Emmanuel (2007). The Nambya Verb With Special Emphasis On The Causative (PhD thesis). University of Oslo. OCLC 553889339.
Doke, Clement Martyn (1931). A comparative study of Shona phonetics. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press.
Hachipola, Simooya Jerome (1998). A Survey of the Minority Languages of Zimbabwe. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications. ISBN 9780908307661. OCLC 42736812.
Hasselbring, Sue (2000). A sociolinguistic survey of the languages of Botswana. Sociolinguistic studies of Botswana language series. Vol. 1. Gaborone: Basarwa Languages Project.
Kadenge, Maxwell (2006). The Phonology of Nambya (MA thesis). University of Zimbabwe.
Moreno, Augustine (1988). Nambya dictionary. Gweru: Mambo Press.
Wentzel, Petrus Johannes (1983). Nau dzabaKalanga [A history of the Kalanga]. Vol. 1–3. Pretoria: University of South Africa.