Ndonga dialect

Ndonga, also called Oshindonga, is a Bantu language spoken in Namibia and parts of Angola. It is a standardized dialect of the Ovambo language, and is mutually intelligible with Kwanyama, the other Ovambo dialect with a standard written form. With 810,000 speakers, the language has the largest number of speakers in Namibia.

"Ndonga" redirects here. For other uses, see Ndonga (disambiguation).
Ndonga
ndonga
Native toNamibia and southern Angola
RegionOvamboland
Native speakers
810,000 (2006)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-1ng
ISO 639-2ndo
ISO 639-3ndo
Glottologndon1254[2]
R.22[3]
Linguasphere99-AUR-lc

Martti Rautanen translated the Bible into the Ndonga standard.[4]

Phonology

Vowels

Oshindonga uses a five-vowel system:

Front Back
Close iu
Mid eo
Open a

Consonants

Oshindonga contains the following consonant phonemes:

Labial Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal voiceless m̥ n̥ ŋ̊
voiced m n ɲ ŋ
Plosive voiceless p t k ʔ
voiced b d g
affricate ts
Fricative voiceless f θ s ʃ x h
voiced v ð z ʒ ɣ
Approximant central w j
lateral l

Prenasalized sounds are listed below:

  • [m̥p]
  • [mb]
  • [ɱv]
  • [n̥θ]
  • [nð]
  • [n̥ʃ]
  • [n̥t]
  • [nd]
  • [nz]
  • [n̥ts]
  • [ŋk]
  • [ŋɡ]

Oshindonga also contains many other consonant compounds, listed below:

  • [m̥pʰ]
  • [n̥tʰ]
  • [n̥kʰ]
  • [m̥pʰw]
  • [n̥tʰw]
  • [n̥kʰw]
  • [n̥dz]
  • [n̥tsʰ]
  • [ndʒ]
  • [xw]
  • [tsʼ] (voiceless, ejective, alveolar affricate)
  • [psʲ] (voiceless, palatalized, labio-alveolar affricate)
gollark: CarrOSt just doesn't work. What even is a carrost?
gollark: This should actually be less disruptive than I thought, I can just isolate the privileged stuff in a separate polychoron process instead of just shutting down all user code.
gollark: What is, the evil exploit someone made?
gollark: It's a very clever exploit - they load some trusted code via PotatOS Privileged Execution™, then send it fake HTTP responses containing code.
gollark: I've probably patched it now (hard to test, because one of my changes broke the exploit code but in a way which could be worked around), but at the cost of causing minor breakage in a mostly unused feature.

References
  1. Ndonga at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Ndonga". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. Jouni Filip Maho, 2009. New Updated Guthrie List Online
  4. "Namiweb.com". Namibweb.com. Archived from the original on 2013-02-13. Retrieved 2013-03-16.
  • Fivaz, Derek (2003). A Reference Grammar of Oshindonga (2 ed.). Windhoek: Out of Africa Publishers.
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