Mbunga Language (Kimbunga) Alphabet

Mbunga has no officially standardised spelling of its own and no letter list in Unicode's CLDR, the locale data behind phones and computers. In practice it is written the way Tanzanians learn to write at school, with the Swahili alphabet: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z. That is the English alphabet without q and x, and with c used only inside ch. The grid holds each letter in capital and small form, 48 in all, and not one of them needs an accent.

Sounds that English writes with a letter pair are written with pairs here too: ch as in church, sh, ny (like the ñ of Spanish año), and nasal clusters such as mb, nd, ng and nj, one of which opens the word Mbunga itself. You simply type the two letters one after another, so they are not listed separately.

Like most Bantu languages of the region, Mbunga uses pitch, but everyday writing in Tanzania does not mark tone, so a message to friends, a church notice or a radio script in Mbunga looks much like Swahili on the page.

How to write ng' and the apostrophe

Swahili spelling separates two sounds that both look like ng. Plain ng is n followed by a hard g, as in English finger, while ng' with an apostrophe is the single nasal of English sing, as in Swahili ng'ombe (cow). Writers who follow Swahili rules for Mbunga use the same apostrophe, so it sits in the grid next to the letters.

The plain keyboard apostrophe ' (U+0027) is what most people type, and it is the safest choice for names and search. In typeset books and newspapers you will also see the curly ’ (U+2019); both are here. In HTML they are ' and ’.

Swahili print in Tanzania commonly uses English-style quotation marks: “double” outside and ‘single’ inside. On Windows, Alt+0147 and Alt+0148 give “ and ”, Alt+0145 and Alt+0146 give ‘ and ’; on a Mac, Option+[ and Option+Shift+[ give “ and ”, Option+] and Option+Shift+] give ‘ and ’. On a phone, long-press the quote key.

Where the Mbunga language is spoken

Mbunga is spoken in Tanzania, in Morogoro Region, around Ifakara in the lower Kilombero valley, among wide rice fields on the floodplain of the Kilombero River. CLDR's population data estimates about 940,000 speakers, but published figures for small Tanzanian languages vary a great deal and other surveys have counted far fewer, so treat any number as a rough estimate.

Linguists place Mbunga among the Bantu languages of south-eastern Tanzania; Guthrie's classification gives it the code P15, beside Ndengereko, Rufiji, Matumbi and Ngindo. Most Mbunga speakers also speak Swahili, the national language, which is used at school, in government and in most writing, and it is common to mix the two in conversation. For the Swahili alphabet see the Swahili collection, for a neighbouring language of the Southern Highlands the Bena collection, and for the flag and the country's emoji see Tanzania.

Money in Mbunga country is the Tanzanian shilling, commonly abbreviated TSh: prices are written TSh 2,000 or 2,000/=, the slash-equals ending seen on Tanzanian price tags and receipts.

Kimbunga, the cyclone and the rice of Kilombero

In Swahili, languages take the prefix Ki-, so the language is Kimbunga and the people Wambunga. The same word kimbunga is also the everyday Swahili word for a cyclone, which is why searches for it mostly bring up storm news such as Kimbunga Hidaya; add lugha (language) or kabila (tribe) to find the people instead.

🌾 is the emoji that belongs most to Mbunga country: the Kilombero valley is one of Tanzania's great rice-growing areas, and Kilombero rice is a well-known name in Tanzanian markets. Add 🇹🇿 and a message about home is complete.