Ndonga dialect

Ndonga
ndonga
Native to	Namibia and southern Angola
Region	Ovamboland
Native speakers	810,000 (2006)[1]
Language family	Niger–Congo Atlantic–Congo Benue–Congo Bantoid Bantu Kavango–Southwest Southwest Bantu Ovambo Ndonga
Language codes
ISO 639-1	ng
ISO 639-2	ndo
ISO 639-3	ndo
Glottolog	ndon1254[2]
Guthrie code	R.22[3]
Linguasphere	99-AUR-lc

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	Back
Close	i	u
Mid	e	o
Open	a

Consonants

Oshinonga contains the following consonant phonemes:

		Labial	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	z	ʒ	ɣ
Approximant	central	w	ð	j
	lateral		l

Oshinonga also contains many consonant compounds, listed below:

• m̥pʰ
• n̥tʰ
• n̥kʰ
• m̥pʰw
• n̥tʰw
• n̥kʰw
• n̥th
• n̥dz
• n̥tsʰ
• xw
• tsˈ (voiceless, ejective, alveolor affricate)
• psʲˈ (voiceless, palatalized, labio-alveolar affricate)

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.

• Fivaz, Derek (2003). A Reference Grammar of Oshindonga (2 ed.). Windhoek: Out of Africa Publishers.

External links

• Ndonga