Kwangali, or RuKwangali, is a

Bantu language The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu language, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀), or Ntu languages are a language family of about 600 languages of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern, East Africa, Eastern and Southeast Africa, South ...

spoken by 85,000 people along the Kavango River in

Namibia Namibia, officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country on the west coast of Southern Africa. Its borders include the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Angola and Zambia to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south; in the no ...

, where it is a national language, and in

Angola Angola, officially the Republic of Angola, is a country on the west-Central Africa, central coast of Southern Africa. It is the second-largest Portuguese-speaking world, Portuguese-speaking (Lusophone) country in both total area and List of c ...

. It is one of several Bantu languages of the Kavango which have

click consonant Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!' ...

s; these are the

dental click Dental (or more precisely denti-alveolar) clicks are a family of click consonants found, as constituents of words, only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia. In English, the ''tut-tut!'' (British spelling, "tutting") o ...

s ''c'' and ''gc,'' along with

prenasalization Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal sonorant) that behave phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering them to be single consonants, rather than clus ...

and aspiration. Maho (2009) includes Mbunza as a dialect, but excludes Sambyu, which he includes in Manyo.

Phonology

Consonants

A dental click type may also be heard, being adopted from the neighboring Khoisan languages. The clicks may also tend to be heard as alveolar .

Vowels

Short vowels of /i e o u/ may also be pronounced as � ɛ ɔ ʊ

References

* Dammann, Ernst (1957). ''Studien zum Kwangali: Grammatik, Texte, Glossar.'' Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter * Derek Nurse & Gérard Philippson, ''The Bantu languages,'' 2003:569.

Books

* ''Rukwangali/English for Children'', Éditions du Cygne, 2013,
Biblical passages in Kwangali
Kavango languages Languages of Angola Languages of Namibia {{Bantu-lang-stub