Town Bemba is an innovative variety of the Bemba language spoken among migrant populations in central

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 ...

. It developed in the mines and mining towns, where it replaced the earlier, and foreign,

Fanagalo Fanagalo, or Fanakalo, is a vernacular or pidgin based primarily on Zulu with input from English and a small amount of Afrikaans input. It is used as a lingua franca, mainly in the gold, diamond, coal and copper mining industries in South Afr ...

. It has been described as a creole, Kees Versteegh, 2009, "Non-Indo-European Pidgins and Creoles", in Kouwenberg & Singler, eds., ''The Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies'' but this is dubious, since Town Bemba never went through a

pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...

phase and its phonology and grammar differ only slightly from standard Bemba.Andrew Gray & Phallen Bwalya, 2015. ''Bemba: a learner's guide to Zambia's largest language'' Unlike in

Nyanja Chewa (also known as Nyanja, ) is a Bantu language spoken in much of Southern, Southeast and East Africa, namely the countries of Malawi , where it is an official language, and Mozambique and Zambia. The noun class prefix ''chi-'' is used for l ...

, whose urban form needs to be treated as a separate language for literary purposes, literacy materials in Bemba such as those produced by iSchool.zm can generally be used by both urban and traditional speakers.

References

{{Reflist Bemba