Mbugwe or Mbuwe (Kimbugwe) is a Bantu language of spoken by the Mbugwe people of

Lake Manyara Lake Manyara is a lake located in Monduli District of Arusha Region, Tanzania and is the seventh-largest lake of Tanzania by surface area, at . It is a shallow, alkaline lake in the Natron-Manyara-Balangida branch of the East African Rift. The n ...

in the

Manyara Region Manyara Region (''Mkoa wa Manyara'' in Swahili) is one of Tanzania's 31 administrative regions. The regional capital is the town of Babati. According to the 2012 national census, the region had a population of 1,425,131, which was lower than th ...

of Central

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 ...

. Mbugwe is estimated to be spoken by some 34,000 people. Mbugwe is isolated from other Bantu languages, being bordered by the locally dominant Cushitic language Iraqw to the west, the

Gorowa language Gorowa is a Cushitic language spoken in Tanzania in the Dodoma and Manyara Region Manyara Region (''Mkoa wa Manyara'' in Swahili) is one of Tanzania's 31 administrative regions. The regional capital is the town of Babati. According to the 20 ...

(or dialect of Iraqw) to the south, the Nilotic

Maasai language Maasai (previously spelled ''Masai'') or Maa (; autonym: ''ɔl Maa'') is an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania by the Maasai people, numbering about 800,000. It is closely related to the other Maa varieti ...

to the east, and the lake to the north. It shares about 70% vocabulary with its Bantu cousin Rangi.

Grammar

As is common across Bantu languages, Mbugwe employs a system of

noun classes In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...

. There are 16 noun classes. The subclasses 1a and 15a are also identified. The syntax is head-initial with adjectives and other modifiers appearing after the noun. Demonstratives may sometimes appear before the head noun.

Phonology

Mbugwe is considered to be a seven-vowel language. It is a tonal language with two levels of tone identified - High and Low. Tone is distinctive lexically as well as grammatically.

Genetic affiliation

The language most closely related to Mbugwe is Rangi spoke in the

Kondoa District Kondoa District is one of the seven districts of the Dodoma Region of Tanzania. It is bordered to the north by Manyara Region, and to the south by Chemba District. Its district capital is the town of Kondoa. According to the 2012 Tanzania Nation ...

of Central Tanzania. Mbugwe has been classified as F.34 following Guthrie's Bantu classification.

References

Languages of Tanzania Mbugwe-Rangi languages {{Bantu-lang-stub