The Shona languages are a
clade
A clade (), also known as a monophyletic group or natural group, is a group of organisms that are monophyletic – that is, composed of a common ancestor and all its lineal descendants – on a phylogenetic tree. Rather than the English term, ...
of
Bantu language
The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages.
The t ...
s coded Zone S.10 in
Guthrie's classification
The 250 or so "Narrow Bantu languages" are conventionally divided up into geographic zones first proposed by Malcolm Guthrie (1967–1971). These were assigned letters A–S and divided into decades (groups A10, A20, etc.); individual languages ...
. According to Nurse & Philippson (2003), the languages form a valid node. They are:
Eastern Shona group
::
Ndau (S.15)
Central Shona group
:: Korekore (S.11) and
Tawara
:: Zezuru (S.12)
::
Manyika (S.13) and
Tewe
:: Karanga (S.14)
Western Shona group
::
Kalanga (S.16)
::
Nambya
The Nambya people are an ethnic group of about 100,000 people, based in the north-western parts of Zimbabwe and in the north-eastern parts of Botswana . They are found around the coal mining town of Hwange, surrounding areas of the Victoria Falls a ...
In the 1920s, the
Rhodesian administration was faced with the challenge of preparing schoolbooks and other materials in the various languages and dialects and requested the recommendation of the South African linguist
Clement Doke
Clement Martyn Doke (16 May 1893 in Bristol, United Kingdom – 24 February 1980 in East London, South Africa) was a South African linguist working mainly on African languages. Realizing that the grammatical structures of Bantu languages are q ...
. Based on his 1931 report,
Standard Shona was developed from the Central Shona varieties. Because of the presence of the capital city in the Zezuru region, that variety has come to dominate in Standard Shona.
Some classifications include the Shona group in
Southern Bantu
The Southern Bantu languages are a large group of Bantu languages, largely validated in Janson (1991/92).Tore Janson (1991-92) "Southern Bantu and Makua", ''Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika'' (''SUGIA'') Vol. 12/13: 63-106, Rüdiger Köppe Verlag ...
, with the other Zone S languages; others treat it separately.
References
* Doke, Clement ''M. Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects''. Government of Southern Rhodesia: Government Blue Book, 1931.
*
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