Ndonga dialect

Ndonga
Oshindonga
Native to Namibia and southern Angola
Region Ovamboland
Native speakers
 810,000  (2006)[1]
Niger–Congo
Language codes
ISO 639-1 ng
ISO 639-2 ndo
ISO 639-3 ndo
Glottolog ndon1254[2]
R.22[3]
Linguasphere 05-PEA-aa

Ndonga, also called Oshindonga, is a Bantu language spoken in Namibia and some parts of Angola. It is a standardized dialect of the Ovambo language, and is mutually intelligible with Kwanyama, the other Ovambo dialect with a standard written form. With 281,500 speakers, the language has the largest number of speakers in Namibia.

Martti Rautanen translated the Bible into the Ndonga standard.[4]

Phonology

Vowels

Oshinonga uses a five-vowel system:

Front Central Back
Close i u
Mid e o
Open a

Consonants

Oshinonga contains the following consonant phonemes:

Labial Inter-
dental		 Alveolar Post-
alveolar		 Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal voiceless m̥ n̥ ŋ̊
voiced m n ɲ ŋ
Plosive voiceless p t k ʔ
voiced b d g
Fricative voiceless f s ʃ x h
voiced v ð z ʒ ɣ
Approximant j w
Lateral l

Oshinonga also contains many consonant compounds, listed below:

References

  1. ↑ Ndonga at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Ndonga". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. ↑ Jouni Filip Maho, 2009. New Updated Guthrie List Online
  4. ↑ "Namiweb.com". Namibweb.com. Retrieved 2013-03-16.

External links

Ndonga dialect test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator