Sukuma (Kisukuma) Language Letters

Kisukuma has no Unicode alphabet of its own: Unicode's CLDR, the data behind phone and computer keyboards, records how many people speak it but lists no letters. In practice the language is written with the Latin letters every Tanzanian learns at school for Swahili, a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p s t u v w y z, with q, x and r left out, since Kisukuma has the sound l but no r. The symbol grid above holds those 46 capital and small letters, the quotation marks of Tanzanian print, and four characters for the language's home.

What looks unusual in written Kisukuma is letter pairs, not accents. As in Swahili, ch, sh and ny each stand for one sound (the ny of Shinyanga is the sound of Spanish ñ), and Tanzanian spelling writes ng’ with an apostrophe for the ng of singer, keeping it apart from the plain ng of finger. Kisukuma is a tonal Bantu language, but everyday writing does not mark tone, so no accents are needed and any keyboard types it. Linguists who describe the sound system in detail use extra phonetic symbols; songs, chats and word lists do not.

Kisukuma, Basukuma, Wasukuma: what the names mean

The Swahili names follow the prefixes that also give Kiswahili and Waswahili: Kisukuma is the language, Wasukuma the people (one person is a Msukuma) and Sukumaland, Usukuma, their homeland. In the people's own language the plural prefix is ba-, so they are also Basukuma. English uses the bare stem, Sukuma, for all of them. The name is usually explained as meaning north: the Sukuma were the people of the north as seen from Unyamwezi, the land of their close neighbours the Nyamwezi.

Swahili also has a verb kusukuma, to push, and that is where sukuma wiki comes from: the East African dish of collard greens whose name means "push the week", the cheap greens that stretch the money to the end of the week. It is a Swahili phrase, popular in Kenya, and not a Sukuma word, which is why searches for Sukuma so often land on recipes for greens.

How to type Kisukuma letters, ng’ and quotes

Every Kisukuma letter is on an ordinary English or Swahili keyboard, so there is nothing to install. For ng’, use an apostrophe: the straight ' on the keyboard is fine, and the curly ’ is what print uses. On Windows hold Alt and type 0146 on the number pad for ’, 0145 for ‘, 0147 for “ and 0148 for ”; on a Mac press Option+Shift+] for ’, Option+] for ‘, Option+[ for “ and Option+Shift+[ for ”. Phones turn straight quotes into curly ones by themselves, or long-press the quote key. In HTML the curly apostrophe is ’.

Prices are written in Tanzanian shillings, which have no Unicode sign of their own: people write TSh before the amount, the code TZS, or the local style with /= after it, as in 1,000/=.

Where the Sukuma language is spoken

Kisukuma is the language of Sukumaland, the farming and cattle country south of Lake Victoria in north-western Tanzania: Mwanza, Shinyanga, Simiyu and Geita regions, around towns such as Mwanza, Shinyanga, Maswa, Bariadi and Kahama. CLDR estimates roughly 5.9 million speakers, all counted in Tanzania, and the Sukuma are usually described as the country's largest ethnic group. Most Sukuma speakers also speak Swahili, the national language, and many live in Dar es Salaam and other cities.

Sukumaland is Tanzania's main cotton-growing area, and cattle, 🐄, are at the centre of family life and wealth there. Sukuma dance and song are famous across Tanzania: drum-led dances, 🥁, by rival dance societies, and the snake dance, 🐍, in which dancers perform with live pythons. The Sukuma Museum at Bujora, near Mwanza, keeps these traditions and hosts dance gatherings.

Kisukuma belongs to the Sukuma–Nyamwezi group of Bantu languages (Guthrie's F.20 group; Sukuma is F.21). Its closest relative is Nyamwezi, spoken to the south around Tabora; the two are so close that they are often described as one dialect continuum, and the Nyamwezi collection sits beside this one. Swahili and Tanzania have their own collections too, for the full set of the country's emoji, its flag and the shilling.