Kisi is a
Bantu language of
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 ...
. Though only half or so of the
Kisi people
The Kisi are a Bantu ethnolinguistic group from Njombe Region, Tanzania, on the northwestern shore of Lake Malawi. In 2001 the Kisi population was estimated to number 18,000, of whom 10,200 spoke the Kisi language. They began using the Nyakyusa l ...
speak the language, use is vigorous where it is still spoken.
Phonology
Other phonemes:
*
¾and
are in a free variation.
*
and
are not included in a phoneme chart in Kisi because they only occur as glide insertion between historically or morphologically adjacent vowels.
does not occur otherwise. For some speakers,
occurs as a free variant of
which is considered incorrect by other speakers.
Contrastive and obligatory length is marked with /:/. This does not necessarily reflect a difference in the length of production.
Swahili: bei, and Swahili: ngao - These Swahili words have been borrowed into Kisi and pronounced with a diphthong in Kisi
#
References
*
Languages of Tanzania
Northeast Bantu languages
{{Bantu-lang-stub