The Central Shonic languages are a cluster of closely related languages spoken principally in Zimbabwe and adjoining Mozambique — Korekore (S11), Zezuru (S12), Manyika (S13), Karanga (S14) — each of which has numerous varieties. A century ago, these languages were harmonized into a single orthography, Standard Shona, following the research of Clement Doke at the request of the Rhodesian administration to make the printing of the Bible or schoolbooks easier. Progressively, the languages have also become more similar, mainly through the influence of Zezuru used in the capital city by the political and cultural elite. However, Hannan's Standard Shona Dictionary, reports the individual languages for each lexical item and those are labelled separately in SBED.
- Name used by speakers: chiShona [t͡ʃiʃóna]; individual varieties are also commonly referred to by their own names, e.g. chiZezuru, chiKaranga, chiManyika.
- Number of speakers: c. 12 million in Zimbabwe, with additional speakers in Mozambique and elsewhere.
- Usage: Shona is spoken across most of the eastern 2/3 of Zimbabwe, and related varieties of Tawara (Korekore) and Tewe (Manyika) extend into central Mozambique. It is one of Zimbabwe's official languages and is extensively used in education, printing, broadcasting, religious life, music and digital media. Standard Shona is the principal written form used across the Shona-speaking area.
- Varieties: The major traditional groups are Zezuru, Karanga, Korekore and Manyika, each of which contains numerous local varieties. The larger group of Shonic languages (S10) includes Eastern Shonic (S15 Ndau) and Western Shonic (S16 Ikaranga, Tjikaranga, Nambya).
- First written: Shonic varieties began to be written systematically in the 1890s.
- Contact: Central Shonic varieties have had prolonged contact with other languages of Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and the political and economic dominance of the Zimbabwean kingdoms and networks had impact on varieties of Nyungwe, Sena, and Venda. Especially through immigrant labor, Ndebele and Chewa contributed numerous loanwords during the 19th and 20th centuries. Portuguese contact, particularly in eastern and northeastern areas, produced an older layer of loans and English has become the principal source of new loanwords and technical vocabulary.
- Distinctive features: Particularly characteristic historically are consonants traditionally described as “whistled” or “whistling” sibilants, represented in older linguistic descriptions by combinations such as sv and zv, although their realization varies substantially among dialects.
Sources for SBED entries
- Hannan, Michael (ed.). 1984. Standard Shona Dictionary. 3rd edn. Salisbury & Bulawayo: College Press in conjunction with the Literature Bureau. — this excellent work is the primary source. It was a collaborative project of which Hannan was the editor, and there were specific team members responsible for each variety.
- Chimhundu, H. 1996. Durumazwi Guru reChiShona. Harare: College Press. — includes example sentences but has fewer entries and does not include information about Shona varieties.
Citation conventions
- verbs generally belong to two categories, either high tone or low tone, and are marked with that tone on the first syllable (either ´ or `). The actual tones of the various syllables depend on the inflected morpheme.
Orthography (cf. Omniglot)
a [a] — Hannan: "Within word stems, when a follows e, i, o and u, an intervocallic y or w seems to be required"
b [ɓ]
bh [b̤]
ch [t͡ʃ]
d [ɗ]
dh [d̤]
e [e]
f [f]
g [ɡ̤]
h [ɦ]
i [i]
j [dʒ]
k [k]
l [l]
m [m]
n [n]
nh [n̤] — Hannan: "nh represents the sound of n accompanied by a simultaneous voiced friction in the glottis. In Korekore the voiced friction is successive to the n sound"
o [o]
p [p]
r [r]
s [s]
sh [ʃ]
t [t]
u [u]
v [ʋ] — in Manyika, this is pronounced [w] or [ø]
vh [v̤]
w [w]
y [j]
z [z̤]
zh [ʒ̤]
Other letter combinations
bv [b͡v̤]
dz [d͡z̤]
dzv [d͡z̤ᵝ]
dy [d̤ʲg]
mb [ᵐb]
mbw [ᵐbw]
mh [m̤]
mv [mʋ̤]
nd [ⁿd]
ng [ŋ]
nj [ⁿd͡ʒ̤]
ny [ɲ]
nz [ⁿz̤]
nzv [ⁿz̤ᵝ]
pf [p͡f]
sv [sᶲ]
sw [skw]
ts [t͡s]
tsv [t͡sᶲ]
ty [tʲk]
zv [z̤ᵝ]
History of orthography:
Doke's work resulted in the Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) and the academic study A Comparative Study of Shona phonetics (1931). Before Doke's report, different missionary groups used their own orthographies. Standard Shona as represented by Doke is mainly based on the Zezuru cluster for both spelling and grammar with influence from (in descending order) Karanga, Manyika, Ndau and Korekore (Doke and Chimhundu 2005: 9). Doke’s work still forms the basis of the orthography used to write Shona nowadays, although it has seen two revisions in 1955 and 1967 by the Shona Language Committee which replaced eight of Doke’s original symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) with Roman letters:
bh [b̤]
ch [t͡ʃ]
d [ɗ]
dh [d̤]
e [e]
f [f]
g [ɡ̤]
h [ɦ]
i [i]
j [dʒ]
k [k]
l [l]
m [m]
n [n]
nh [n̤] — Hannan: "nh represents the sound of n accompanied by a simultaneous voiced friction in the glottis. In Korekore the voiced friction is successive to the n sound"
o [o]
p [p]
r [r]
s [s]
sh [ʃ]
t [t]
u [u]
v [ʋ] — in Manyika, this is pronounced [w] or [ø]
vh [v̤]
w [w]
y [j]
z [z̤]
zh [ʒ̤]
Other letter combinations
bv [b͡v̤]
dz [d͡z̤]
dzv [d͡z̤ᵝ]
dy [d̤ʲg]
mb [ᵐb]
mbw [ᵐbw]
mh [m̤]
mv [mʋ̤]
nd [ⁿd]
ng [ŋ]
nj [ⁿd͡ʒ̤]
ny [ɲ]
nz [ⁿz̤]
nzv [ⁿz̤ᵝ]
pf [p͡f]
sv [sᶲ]
sw [skw]
ts [t͡s]
tsv [t͡sᶲ]
ty [tʲk]
zv [z̤ᵝ]
History of orthography:
Doke's work resulted in the Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) and the academic study A Comparative Study of Shona phonetics (1931). Before Doke's report, different missionary groups used their own orthographies. Standard Shona as represented by Doke is mainly based on the Zezuru cluster for both spelling and grammar with influence from (in descending order) Karanga, Manyika, Ndau and Korekore (Doke and Chimhundu 2005: 9). Doke’s work still forms the basis of the orthography used to write Shona nowadays, although it has seen two revisions in 1955 and 1967 by the Shona Language Committee which replaced eight of Doke’s original symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) with Roman letters:
— ɓ > b
— ɗ > d
— ʂ > sv
— ʐ > zv
— ʃ > sh
— ʒ > zh
— ʋ > v
— ŋ > ng’
Where Doke used the principle of ‘one sound, one symbol’, this turned out to be inaccessible in use, for example because symbols like this do not exist on a type writer or people were unfamiliar with what the symbols represented as they were from the IPA. There has not been a revision since 1967. For an extensive overview about the history of Shona orthography and orthographical revisions, see Doke, C.M. and H. Chimhundu. 2005. The Unification of the Shona Dialects. A Photographic reprint with an Introduction by Herbert Chimhundu. Oslo: ALLEX Project.