Ethnicity Shubi people ISO 639-3 suj | Native speakers (153,000 cited 1987) Glottolog shub1238 | |
Region Kagera Region in Tanzania Language family Niger–Congo
Atlantic–Congo
Benue–Congo
Bantoid
Bantu
Northeast Bantu
Great Lakes Bantu
Ruanda-Rundi
Shubi |
Shubi (Subi) is a Bantu language spoken in by the Shubi people in north-western Tanzania. It may use labiodental plosives /p̪/, /b̪/ (sometimes written ȹ, ȸ) as phonemes, rather than as allophones of /p, b/. Peter Ladefoged wrote:
We have heard labiodental stops made by a Shubi speaker whose teeth were sufficiently close together to allow him to make an airtight labiodental closure. For this speaker this sound was clearly in contrast with a bilabial stop; but we suspect that the majority of Shubi speakers make the contrast one of bilabial stop versus labial-labiodental affricate (i.e. bilabial stop closure followed by a labiodental fricative), rather than bilabial versus labiodental stop.References
Shubi language Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA