Suvarna Garge (Editor)

Tetela language

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Native speakers
  
(760,000 cited 1991)

Glottolog
  
tete1253

Native to
  
Democratic Republic of the Congo

Region
  
Northern Kasai Oriental Province

Language family
  
Niger–Congo Atlantic–Congo Benue–Congo Bantoid Bantu (Zone C) Tetela (C.70) Tetela–Hamba Tetela

ISO 639-3
  
Either: tll – Tetela hba – Hamba

Tetela (Otetela, Kitetela, Kikitatela), also Sungu, is a Bantu language of northern Kasai-Oriental Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is spoken by the Tetela people.

[Ethnologue]] moved the Hamba dialect to a different branch of Bantu. However, Maho (2009) retains it in Tetela.

Noun classes

Like other Bantu languages, Tetela grammar arranges nouns into a number of classes. The ancestral system had 22 classes (counting singular and plural as distinct according to the Meinhof system), with most Bantu languages sharing at least ten of them.

References

Tetela language Wikipedia