Tumbuka Alphabet (Chitumbuka)

Tumbuka is written with these letters: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Ŵ Y Z. Native words have no q or x, and there are no accented vowels. Unicode’s CLDR database has no letter list for Tumbuka yet, so the set here follows the standard Malawian spelling used in schools, newspapers and the Bible. The five vowels a e i o u sound roughly as in Spanish or Italian, and nearly every syllable ends in a vowel: Chiuta (God), vinthu (things), Rumphi, the district town at the heart of Tumbuka country.

Much of the work is done by letter pairs that stand for one sound: ch as in Chitumbuka, ny as in canyon, ng’ as in singer, and the breathy kh, ph and th, where the h marks a puff of air, as in vinthu. Words often start with m or n before another consonant: Mzuzu, the city of the north, and Nkhukutemwa, I love you. Tumbuka uses r as well as l, as in Rumphi and kurya (to eat).

Ŵ and ŵ: the letter Tumbuka adds to A–Z

ŵ, w with a circumflex (U+0175, capital Ŵ U+0174), is the one letter Tumbuka adds to the alphabet, and it is far more frequent here than in Chichewa. It represents the voiced bilabial fricative [β], contrasting with plain w [w], and it shows up constantly because it starts the plural prefix for people: ŵanthu (people), ŵana (children). A sentence about people in Tumbuka can hardly avoid it.

In quick texting some people simply type w, but books, hymn books, the Bible and careful writing keep ŵ, so a Tumbuka page without it can read as a shortcut. The same character serves Chichewa, where it is rarer, and Welsh, where it marks a long vowel; the country’s own name was long printed Malaŵi.

How to type ŵ and the ng’ apostrophe

ŵ is not in the old Windows character sets, so it has no short Alt code. In Microsoft Word type 0175 and press Alt+X (0174 for Ŵ). The United Kingdom Extended keyboard, made for Welsh, types it with AltGr+6 and then w. On a Mac, switch to the ABC Extended layout and press Option+6, then w. On a phone, add a Welsh keyboard and long-press w. In HTML write ŵ and Ŵ, or ŵ and Ŵ. Or simply copy ŵ and Ŵ from this page.

The apostrophe in ng’ marks the ng of English singer, with no g sound after it: ng’ombe (cow). Either the straight keyboard apostrophe ' or the curly ’ that phones produce is right; on Windows the curly one is Alt+0146, on a Mac Option+Shift+]. Linguists sometimes write the sound as ŋ, but schools in Malawi use ng’. Punctuation otherwise follows English: , . ? ! and curly quotes “ ” with ‘ ’ inside them.

Tumbuka greetings and everyday words

Monire is hello, and in the morning people ask Mwawuka uli?, how did you wake up? The plural mu- and mwa- forms are the polite ones, used for anyone older or a stranger. Yewo is thank you and Yewo chomene thank you very much; it is one of the first words that tells a Tumbuka speaker from a Chichewa speaker, who says zikomo.

Nkhukutemwa means I love you, the same for a man or a woman. Tiwonanenge is see you later. God is Chiuta, a word heard in every church service and hymn of the north, and a great deal of written Tumbuka is religious: the Bible and the hymn book are among the best-known Tumbuka texts.

Where Tumbuka is spoken

Unicode’s CLDR estimates about 2.4 million speakers of Tumbuka. About 1.8 million are in Malawi 🇲🇼, where it is the everyday language of the Northern Region, from Mzuzu and Mzimba to Rumphi and Karonga, used even by many whose first language is another one. About 540,000 are in Zambia 🇿🇲, in Eastern Province around Lundazi, where it is not one of the seven official regional languages.

Tumbuka became a written language through the Livingstonia Mission of the Free Church of Scotland in the late nineteenth century, whose schools and printing press made it the language of education in the north. In Mzimba the Ngoni, who arrived from southern Africa in the nineteenth century, came to speak it in place of their own Nguni language. From 1968 President Banda’s one-language policy took Tumbuka out of schools and off the national radio in favour of Chichewa; it returned to the airwaves after multiparty democracy in 1994. It is a Bantu language, a cousin of Chichewa and Bemba, which have their own collections, and the Malawi and Zambia collections have the flags, the kwacha and each country’s emoji.