ISO 639-2 tum Glottolog tumb1250 | ISO 639-3 tum | |
Native speakers 2.6 million (2006–2010) Language family Niger–CongoAtlantic–CongoBenue–CongoBantoidBantuTumbuka | ||
The Tumbuka language is a Bantu language which is spoken in the Northern Region of Malawi and also in the Lundazi district of Zambia. It is also known as Chitumbuka or Citumbuka — the chi- prefix in front of Tumbuka means "the language of", and is understood in this case to mean "the language of (the Tumbuka people)". Tumbuka belongs to the same language group (Guthrie Zone N) as Chewa and Sena.
Contents
- Tumbuka spelling
- Tumbuka nouns
- Tumbuka concords
- Linguistic descriptions
- Tumbuka tone
- Helpful phrases
- Greetings
- People
- Verbs
- Animals
- References
The World Almanac (1998) estimates that there are approximately 2,000,000 Tumbuka speakers, though other sources estimate a much smaller number. The majority of Tumbuka speakers are said to live in Malawi. Tumbuka is the most widely spoken of the languages of Northern Malawi, especially in the Rumphi, Mzuzu, and Mzimba districts.
There are substantial differences between the form of Tumbuka spoken in urban areas of Malawi (which borrows some words from Swahili and Chewa) and the "village" or "deep" Tumbuka spoken in villages. The Rumphi variant is often regarded as the most "linguistically pure", and is sometimes called "real Tumbuka". The Mzimba dialect has been strongly influenced by Zulu (chiNgoni), even so far as to have clicks in words like chitha [ʇʰitʰa] "urinate", which do not occur in other dialects.
The Tumbuka language suffered during the rule of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, since in 1968 as a result of his one-nation, one-language policy it lost its status as an official language in Malawi. As a result, Tumbuka was removed from the school curriculum, the national radio, and the print media. With the advent of multi-party democracy in 1994, Tumbuka programmes were started again on the radio, but the number of books and other publications in Tumbuka remains low.
Tumbuka spelling
Two systems of writing Tumbuka are in use: the traditional spelling (used for example in the Chitumbuka version of Wikipedia and in the newspaper Fuko), in which words such as banthu 'people' and chaka 'year' are written with 'b' and 'ch', and the new official spelling (used for example in the Citumbuka dictionary published online by the Centre for Language Studies and in the online Bible), in which the same words are written with 'ŵ' and 'c', e.g. ŵanthu and caka. (The sound 'ŵ' is a closely rounded [w] pronounced with the tongue in the close-i position.) There is some uncertainty over where to write 'r' and where 'l', e.g. cakulya (Dictionary) or cakurya (Bible) 'food'. (In fact [l] and [r] are allophones of the same phoneme.)
Tumbuka nouns
As is usual with Bantu languages, Tumbuka nouns are grouped into different noun classes according to their singular and plural prefixes. Each class of noun has its own adjective, pronoun, and verb agreements, known as 'concords'. Where the agreements disagree with the prefix, the agreements take precedence in deciding the class of noun. For example, the noun katundu 'possessions', despite having the prefix ka-, is placed in class 1, since one says katundu uyu 'these possessions' using the class 1 demonstrative uyu. Malawians themselves (e.g. in the University of Malawi's Citumbuka dictionary) refer to the noun classes by traditional names such as "Mu-Ŵa-"; Bantu specialists, however, refer to the classes by numbers (1/2 etc.) corresponding to the noun-classes of other Bantu languages. Occasionally nouns do not correspond to the classes below, e.g. fumu 'chief' (class 9) irregularly has a plural mafumu in class 6.
Class 1/2 (Mu-Ŵa-)
Some nouns in this class lack the prefix Mu-:
Class 3/4 (Mu-Mi-)
Class 5/6 (Li-Ma-)
Class 7/8 (Ci-Vi-)
Class 9/10 (Yi-Zi-)
Class 11 (Lu-)
Some speakers treat words in this class as if they were in class 5/6.
Class 12/13 (Ka-Tu-)
Class 14/6 (U-Ma-)
These nouns are frequently abstract and have no plural.
Class 15 (Ku-) Infinitive
Classes 16, 17, 18 (Pa-, Ku-, Mu-) Locative
Tumbuka concords
Verbs, adjectives, numbers, possessives, and pronouns in Tumbuka have to agree with the noun referred to. This is done by means of prefixes or suffixes (called 'concords') which differ according to the class of noun. Class 1 has the greatest variety of concords, differing for pronouns, numbers, adjectives, verbs, and possessives:
Other noun classes have a smaller variety of concords, as can be seen from the table below:
Linguistic descriptions
Some remarks on Tumbuka tenses can be found in Kiso (2012).
Tumbuka tone
Tumbuka has a tonal accent but in a very limited way, in that every word, spoken in isolation, has the same falling tone on the penultimate syllable (which also coincides with stress). It is therefore not possible in Tumbuka to contrast two different words or two different tenses tonally, as it is in Chichewa and other Bantu languages. However, this penultimate falling tone occurs not on every word, but only on the last word of a phonological phrase; e.g. in the following sentence, only the second word has a tone, the first being toneless:
A greater variety of tonal patterns is found in the ideophones (expressive words) of Tumbuka; for example Low (yoyoyo 'disintegrating into small pieces'), High (fyá: 'swooping low (of birds)'), High-Low (phúli 'sound of thing bursting'), and Low-High (yií 'sudden disappearance'), etc.
Intonational tones are also used in Tumbuka; for example, in yes-no questions there is often a High-Low fall on the final syllable of the question:
There does not seem to be any consistent, direct correlation between tone in Tumbuka and focus.
Helpful phrases
Greetings
People
The plural ba- (ŵa-) is often used for politeness when referring to elders: