Shona

Story

chiShona is a Bantu language spoken by the Shona people of Zimbabwe, where it serves as the mother tongue of roughly 70 percent of the population. The language as it exists today is largely a twentieth-century construction: colonial administrators and missionaries in the 1930s fused several closely related dialects, including Karanga, Zezuru, and Korekore, into a single standardised written form known as Union Shona. The Shona people have a long history of state-building on the Zimbabwe plateau, including the civilisation that built Great Zimbabwe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, and chiShona was the language of those kingdoms. The first novel written in chiShona, Feso by Solomon Mutswairo, was published in 1957.

At a glance

• Also known as: chiShona
• Family: Niger-Congo
• Region: Southern Africa
• Speakers: 14M (total speakers (l1 plus l2): approximately 9.6 million l1 plus 4.5 million l2 (ethnologue 2023 figures))
• Writing system: Latin
• Greeting: Mhoro (hello, informal singular)

Spoken in

Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia

Common questions