Lomwe Language Letters

Lomwe is a Bantu language of the Makhuwa–Lomwe group, and like the other Mozambican languages it is written with the ordinary Latin alphabet. Its spelling follows the common orthography worked out for Mozambique's Bantu languages at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, which writes every sound with plain letters or pairs of letters instead of accents, hooks or tildes. The grid on this page has each letter in capital and small form; q is left out because standard Elomwe spelling does not use it, and b, d, g, j and z are rare, found mostly in loanwords and names.

Unicode's CLDR has no alphabet list for Lomwe yet, which is why this page shows the plain letters rather than a short special set. For anyone typing Lomwe that is good news: a phone or laptop set to English or Portuguese already has every letter the language needs.

How Lomwe spelling works: doubled vowels, kh, th and ch

Lomwe uses letter combinations to represent some sounds, as Makhuwa does. A doubled vowel is a long vowel: the Lomwe Bible is Piipiliya, with a long ii in the first syllable. An h after a consonant marks an aspirated sound, so kh, ph, th and ch are single sounds, and this th is not the th of English think. Standard Mozambican Elomwe uses c and ch where Makhuwa uses tt and tth; ny is the ny of canyon, like Spanish ñ.

Lomwe is a tonal language, but the everyday spelling does not mark tone, so there are no accented vowels to look for. The language's own name shows another Makhuwa-family habit: languages take the prefix e-, so the language is Elomwe, just as Makhuwa is Emakhuwa, while the people are the Alomwe.

Apostrophes and quotation marks in Lomwe texts

Beyond the letters, the characters a Lomwe text needs are punctuation, and they follow the habits of Portuguese and English writing in Mozambique and Malawi: commas, full stops, question and exclamation marks, curly double quotes “ ” with single ones ‘ ’ inside them, and the apostrophe.

The straight ' on the keyboard and the curly ’ (U+2019) are read as the same mark; publishers use the curly one. To type it, press Alt+0146 on the Windows number pad or Option+Shift+] on a Mac, or hold the apostrophe key on a phone. The quotes “ and ” are Alt+0147 and Alt+0148 on Windows and Option+[ and Option+Shift+[ on a Mac. In HTML they are ’, “ and ”.

Where the Lomwe language is spoken

Lomwe is the language of Zambezia province in central Mozambique 🇲🇿, in the hill country around Gurué, Alto Molócuè and Milange, and it reaches into the neighbouring provinces of Nampula and Niassa. Unicode's CLDR estimates about 2.3 million speakers in Mozambique. Mount Namuli, near Gurué, holds a special place in Makhuwa and Lomwe tradition as the place their peoples came from.

Across the border, the Lomwe of southern Malawi 🇲🇼, in districts such as Mulanje, Thyolo and Phalombe, descend from people who moved there from Mozambique in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of them now speak Chichewa at home, and the Malawian form of the language, often spelled Lhomwe, has a language code of its own (lon), separate from Mozambican Lomwe (ngl).

Lomwe's closest relative is Makhuwa, the largest African language of Mozambique, and its neighbours include Sena in Zambezia and Yao and Nyanja to the west; each of those has a collection here too. Many Lomwe speakers in Mozambique also use Portuguese, the official language, and the Mozambique collection has the Portuguese letters ç ã õ for names such as Moçambique, the metical's MT and the country's emoji.