Shona Alphabet

Shona, chiShona to its speakers, is written with the standard Shona orthography taught in Zimbabwean schools. Its alphabet is the English one minus two letters: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z, 24 letters, each with a capital and a small form. Q and x are not used at all, c appears only in the pair ch, and l turns up mostly in borrowed words and names, because native Shona words use r where English would have l: chikoro is school.

There are five vowels, a e i o u, always said the same way, and Shona words end in a vowel: baba (father), amai (mother), mbira. Shona is a tonal language, where the pitch of a syllable can tell words apart, but the standard spelling does not mark tone, so a Shona text has no accented letters to find.

Shona letter pairs: sv, zv, bh, mh, ny and n'

What gives Shona its look is not special characters but letter groups that stand for single sounds. Ch, sh and zh are the sounds of church, shoe and measure; ny is the ny of canyon; ts, dz, pf and bv are each one sound. Sv and zv are the famous whistled s and z of Shona, said with the lips rounded, as in svika (arrive), Svondo (Sunday), Masvingo and zvakanaka (it's good); they combine into tsv and dzv too, as in tsvuku (red).

An h after a letter changes it. Plain b and d are implosive, said with the air drawn inward, while bh and dh are breathy and turn up in borrowed words like bhazi (bus); mh and nh are breathy m and n, as in mhoro (hi) and nhasi (today). Plain v is a soft sound close to English w, while vh is the hard English v of vhiki (week) and Muvhuro (Monday). W also follows other consonants, as in mbwa (dog) and kwete (no), which is why learners look up Shona words with chw, shw, tsw and ngw.

The only character beyond plain A to Z is the apostrophe of n', the ng sound at the end of English sing, which Shona can put at the start of a word: n'anga is a traditional healer. Leave out the apostrophe and the sound changes, so na and n'a are not the same.

The old Shona letters ȿ ɀ ɓ ɗ ŋ

Before Shona had one spelling, missions in each region printed hymn books and primers in their own spellings of Zezuru, Karanga, Manyika or Korekore. In 1931 the linguist Clement Doke reported on unifying them, and the spelling that followed used special letters: ɓ and ɗ for the implosive b and d, ŋ for the ng of sing, and an s and a z with a swash tail, ȿ and ɀ, for the whistled sounds.

The s and z swash-tail letters appeared in printed Shona books, but in 1955 the special letters were dropped for plain letters and pairs: sv and zv for ȿ and ɀ, n' for ŋ, and plain b and d for the implosives. Books from those years still use them, which is why Unicode encodes ȿ (U+023F) and ɀ (U+0240), with the capitals Ȿ (U+2C7E) and Ɀ (U+2C7F) added later. You need them only to quote or retype old printed Shona; they are in the grid above.

How to type Shona letters and n'

You do not need a special Shona keyboard: every modern Shona letter is on an ordinary English keyboard, on a PC, a Mac, an iPhone or an Android phone. The plain apostrophe ' for n' sits next to Enter on a US layout. Word processors and phones often turn it into the curly ’, which is also correct; to type ’ yourself, hold Alt and type 0146 on the Windows number pad, press Option+Shift+] on a Mac, long-press the apostrophe key on a phone, or write ’ in HTML.

For the historical letters, copy them from this page, or in Microsoft Word type the code and press Alt+X: 023F gives ȿ, 0240 ɀ, 0253 ɓ, 0257 ɗ and 014B ŋ. In HTML ȿ is ȿ and ɀ ɀ. Watch the look-alike: ŋ is not the Greek letter η.

Where Shona is spoken

Shona is the most widely spoken language of Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 and one of its 16 official languages. Unicode's CLDR estimates about 14 million speakers, across Harare, Mashonaland, Masvingo, the Midlands and Manicaland, and among Zimbabweans abroad. Standard Shona was unified from the central dialects Zezuru, Karanga, Korekore and Manyika; Manyika and Ndau also continue across the border into Mozambique 🇲🇿.

Shona is a Bantu language of the Niger–Congo family. Its closest relatives have their own collections: Manyika, Ndau and Kalanga. Zimbabwe's other big language, Ndebele, is a Nguni language close to Zulu and has a collection of its own, and the Zimbabwe collection gathers the flag, the money and the country's emoji. Prices are mostly written in US dollars with $; the ZiG (Zimbabwe Gold) is written as the three letters ZiG.