Shubi language
| Shubi | |
|---|---|
| Region | Kagera Region in Tanzania |
| Ethnicity | Shubi people |
Native speakers | (153,000 cited 1987)[1] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | suj |
| Glottolog | shub1238 |
JD.64[2] | |
Shubi is a Bantu language spoken by the Shubi people in north-western Tanzania.[3]: 168
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.[4]
Vocabulary
[edit]Many Bantu languages have a large set of lexical items for expressing time-frames by days (similar to English's yesterday, today, tomorrow, day after tomorrow). However, Shubi has a small set compared to other Bantu languages:[5]
| Shubi | English gloss |
|---|---|
| nyenkilo | yesterday |
| mbwenu | today |
| nyencha | tomorrow |
| bukiile | the following day |
| kale | in the past |
References
[edit]- ↑ Shubi at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ↑ Jouni Filip Maho, 2009. New Updated Guthrie List Online
- ↑ Polome, Andre Robert (1975). THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE BANTU LANGUAGES OF TANZANIA (PhD thesis). University of Texas at Austin. ISBN 9781083386878. Retrieved 4 October 2026 – via ProQuest.
- ↑ LINGUIST List 5.219: Labiodental nasals
- ↑ Lusekelo, Amani (17 December 2023). "The lexicalization of concepts of time in naming sequences of days in Tanzanian Bantu". Studies in African Linguistics. 52 (Supplement.13): 233–255. doi:10.32473/sal.52.Supplement.13.133797. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
External links
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