The Mambwe and

Lungu Lungu is a village in Türi Parish, Rapla County in western-central Estonia Estonia, formally the Republic of Estonia, is a country by the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from F ...

peoples living at the southern end of

Lake Tanganyika Lake Tanganyika () is an African Great Lake. It is the second-oldest freshwater lake in the world, the second-largest by volume, and the second-deepest, in all cases after Lake Baikal in Siberia. It is the world's longest freshwater lake. ...

Tanzania Tanzania (; ), officially the United Republic of Tanzania ( sw, Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It borders Uganda to the north; Kenya to the northeast; Comoro Islands and ...

and

Zambia Zambia (), officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern and East Africa, although it is typically referred to as being in Southern Africa at its most cent ...

speak a common language with minor dialectical differences. Perhaps half of the

Fipa people The Fipa (or Wafipa) are a Bantu ethno-linguistic group based in the Sumbawanga Rural and Nkasi districts of Rukwa Region in southwestern Tanzania speaking the Fipa and Mambwe languages. In 1992, the Fipa population was estimated to number 20 ...

to their north speak it as a native language. When spoken by the Fipa, it is called "Fipa-Mambwe"; this is also the term for the branch of Bantu languages which includes Fipa and Mambwe-Lungu. Mambwe language is spoken by the people who are found in Rukwa region, southern Sumbawanga town. It is a language which is one of the three dialects spoken by the indigenous people of Rukwa Region. People of this region speak Fipa, Mambwe and Kinyiha. Mambwe language is spoken likely to Fipa but there variation in which some terms are understood among the speaker of these two languages Mambwe language is also spoken in some parts of Zambia as their mother tongue although they differ in manners of articulation.

References

Relevant literature

* Halemba, Andrzej. 2005. ''Religious and Ethical Values in the Proverbs of the Mambwe People (Zambia).'' Vol. 1. Poland. *Werner, A. and A. N. Tucker. 1940. Mambwe Proverbs. ''Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies'' 10.2 (1940), pp. 455-467.

External links

small Mambwe–English dictionary
Rukwa languages Languages of Zambia Languages of Tanzania {{Bantu-lang-stub