Kimbundu Alphabet & Phrases

Kimbundu is a Bantu language of northern Angola, the language of the Ambundu (Mbundu) people. Its name is built the Bantu way: the prefix ki- marks a language, as in Kiswahili and Kikongo, so Kimbundu is the speech of the Mbundu. The standard spelling used for it in Angola today writes it with 23 Latin letters, A B D E F G H I J K L M N O P S T U V W X Y Z, plus digraphs such as bh, ph, th and ny. The letters c, q and r are not part of the current standard alphabet.

Three choices give Kimbundu its look. k writes the k sound: Kimbundu, kitanda (market), words that Portuguese spells quimbundo and quitanda. x is the sh sound, as in Portuguese: muxima, heart, is said "mu-shee-ma". w and y are the glides of English we and yes, which is why the river and the currency are spelled Kwanza in Angolan usage and Cuanza in older Portuguese spelling.

Many words begin with a nasal fused to the next consonant, written as pairs that are read as one sound: mb, nd, ng, nj, nz. That is why Kimbundu names look unusual to English readers: Ngola, Ndongo, Nzambi, Njinga. The five vowels a e i o u sound roughly as in Spanish or Italian. Kimbundu is a tonal language, where the pitch of a syllable can change a word, but everyday writing leaves tone unmarked, so no accented letters are needed.

Common Kimbundu phrases: hello, thank you and kiambote

The word to know first is kiambote, well, good. The morning greeting is Wazekele kiambote?, literally "did you sleep well?", and the answer is Ngazekele kiambote, "I slept well". Thank you is Ngasakidila.

A handful of everyday words are worth learning with them: muxima, heart; kamba, friend, which Luandans use in Portuguese too; mona, child; ngana, a respectful word for sir or madam; Nzambi, God; kalunga, the sea and, in old belief, the world of the dead that lies beyond it; and kitanda, the market.

Kimbundu also names two dances Angola gave the world: semba, from the word for the touch of the navels in the dance, and kizomba, which means party. The band Ngola Ritmos in the 1950s and later the singer Bonga, whose 1972 song Mona Ki Ngi Xica is sung in Kimbundu, kept the language at the centre of Angolan popular music.

Kimbundu words in Portuguese and English

Kimbundu is one of the African languages that most shaped Brazilian Portuguese, because so many of the people taken from Angola to Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade spoke it. Dictionaries trace to it quilombo (from kilombo, a war camp), the name of the settlements of people who escaped slavery; senzala (from sanzala, village), the slave quarters of a plantation; caçula (from kasule), the youngest child; moleque (from muleke), a boy or a rascal; quitanda, a small greengrocer's; bunda, the bottom; and cafuné, stroking someone's hair as they rest.

Angola is named for the Kimbundu title ngola. Ngola was the title of the kings of Ndongo, the Mbundu kingdom the Portuguese met in the sixteenth century, and they named the land after it: Angola. The best-known Mbundu ruler is Queen Njinga Mbande, also written Nzinga, who resisted Portuguese conquest for decades in the seventeenth century. In English, zombie comes through Haitian Creole zonbi from a Bantu word, and dictionaries compare it with Kimbundu nzumbi, a spirit of the dead.

How to type Kimbundu on any keyboard

Kimbundu needs no special letters at all: an English, Portuguese or French keyboard has all 23 Latin letters. On a phone, the only trap is autocorrect turning kitanda or kiambote into something else; add the words you use to the keyboard dictionary.

Punctuation follows the Portuguese of Angola. Angolan Portuguese follows the European tradition of the angle quotes « », and the curly quotes “ ” are common too, especially in everyday typing. On Windows, « is Alt+0171 and » is Alt+0187, “ is Alt+0147 and ” is Alt+0148; on a Mac, Option+\ and Option+Shift+\ give « and », Option+[ and Option+Shift+[ give “ and ”. In HTML they are « » “ ”.

Prices are in the Angolan kwanza, which has no Unicode sign of its own: it is written Kz after the amount, as in 5 000 Kz, with the two letters from the grid.

Where the Kimbundu language is spoken

Kimbundu is spoken in north-central Angola, in a band running inland from Luanda through the provinces of Bengo, Kwanza Norte and Malanje. The 2024 census recorded 3,728,001 people with Kimbundu as their mother tongue, making it the second most widely spoken African language of Angola after Umbundu, the language of the central highlands. In Luanda, the capital, Portuguese has become the first language of most young people, yet Kimbundu words run all through the city's Portuguese and its music.

Kimbundu was written early. Jesuits printed a catechism in it in the 1640s, and in 1697 Pedro Dias published Arte da Lingua de Angola, a Kimbundu grammar written in Brazil for priests working among enslaved Angolans there. In the 1880s and 1890s the Swiss missionary Héli Chatelain published a grammar and Folk-Tales of Angola, Kimbundu stories printed with English translations.

Kimbundu belongs to the Bantu family, related to its neighbours Umbundu and Kongo and more distantly to Lingala and Swahili; see our Umbundu, Kongo, Lingala and Swahili collections. For Portuguese letters such as ã ç é, see our Portuguese collection, and for the flag 🇦🇴, food, music and the rest of the country's emoji, see our Angola collection.