Chewa (; ) is a Bantu language spoken in Malawi and a recognised minority in Eastern Zambia and Tete province of Mozambique. The prefix chi- in front of Chewa means "in the manner of" (the Chewa people). In Malawi, the name was officially changed from Chinyanja to Chichewa in 1968 at the insistence of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda and is still the name most commonly used in Malawi today.Kishindo (2001), p.265.
Chewa belongs to the same language group (Guthrie Zone N) as Tumbuka, SenaKiso (2012), pp.21ff. and Nsenga. Throughout the history of Malawi, only Chewa and Tumbuka were official languages of Malawi used by government officials and in school curricula, along with English. However, the Tumbuka language suffered a lot during the rule of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, as it lost its status as one of Malawi's official languages in 1968 as a result of the president's "one nation, one language" policy. As a result, Tumbuka was removed from the school curriculum, the national radio, and the print media.Kamwendo (2004), p.278. With the advent of multi-party democracy in 1994, Tumbuka programmes were started again on the radio.See Language Mapping Survey for Northern Malawi (2006), pp.38–40 for a list of publications.
Distribution Chewa is one of the widely spoken languages in Malawi, about 34% of the country's population. It is spoken in the Central and some parts of Southern Region of the country.Mchombo (2006). It is also spoken in Eastern Province of Zambia, as well as in Mozambique, in the province of Niassa. It was one of the 55 languages featured on the Voyager spacecraft.
History The Chewa were a branch of the Maravi people who lived in the Eastern Province of Zambia and in northern Mozambique as far south as the River Zambezi from the 16th century or earlier.Marwick (1963)Newitt (1982).
The name "Chewa" (in the form Chévas) was first recorded by António Gamitto, who at the age of 26 in 1831 was appointed as second-in-command of an expedition from Tete to the court of King Kazembe in what became Zambia. His route took him through the country of King Undi west of the Dzalanyama mountains, across a corner of present-day Malawi and on into Zambia.Marwick (1964). Later he wrote an account including some ethnographic and linguistic notes and vocabularies. According to Gamitto, the Malawi or Maravi people (Maraves) were those ruled by King Undi south of the Chambwe stream (not far south of the present border between Mozambique and Zambia), while the Chewa lived north of the Chambwe.Marwick (1963), p.383.
Another, more extensive, list of 263 words and phrases of the language was made by the German missionary Sigismund Koelle who, working in Sierra Leone in West Africa, interviewed some 160 former slaves and recorded vocabularies in their languages. He published the results in a book called Polyglotta Africana in 1854. Among other slaves was one Mateke, who spoke what he calls "Maravi". Mateke's language is clearly an early form of Chichewa, but in a southern dialect. For example, the modern Chichewa phrase 'two years' was in Mateke's speech, whereas for Johannes Rebmann's informant Salimini, who came from the Lilongwe region, it was .Goodson (2011). The same dialect difference survives today in the word or '(to) plant'.Downing & Mtenje (2017), p. 46.
Apart from the few words recorded by Gamitto and Koelle, the first extensive record of the Chewa language was made by Johannes Rebmann in his Dictionary of the Kiniassa Language, published in 1877 but written in 1853–1854. Rebmann was a missionary living near Mombasa in Kenya, and he obtained his information from a Malawian slave, known by the Swahili name Salimini, who had been captured in Malawi some ten years earlier.Rebman (1877), preface. Salimini, who came from a place called Mphande apparently in the Lilongwe region, also noted some differences between his own dialect, which he called , the "language of the plateau", and the dialect spoken further south; for example, the Maravi gave the name to the tree which he himself called .Rebmann (1877) s.v. M'ombo.
The first grammar, A Grammar of the Chinyanja language as spoken at Lake Nyasa with Chinyanja–English and English–Chinyanja vocabulary, was written by Alexander Riddel in 1880. Further early grammars and vocabularies include A grammar of Chinyanja, a language spoken in British Central Africa, on and near the shores of Lake Nyasa by George Henry (1891) and M.E. Woodward's A vocabulary of English–Chinyanja and Chinyanja–English: as spoken at Likoma, Lake Nyasa (1895). The whole Bible was translated into the Likoma Island dialect of Chichewa by William Percival Johnson and published as in 1912.The UMCA in Malawi, p 126, James Tengatenga, 2010: "Two important pieces of work have been accomplished during these later years. First, the completion by Archdeacon Johnson of the Bible in Chinyanja, and secondly, the completed Chinyanja prayer book in 1908." Another Bible translation, known as the , was made in a more standard Central Region dialect about 1900–1922 by missionaries of the Dutch Reformed Mission and Church of Scotland with the help of some Malawians. This has recently (2016) been reissued in a revised and slightly modernised version.Bible Society of Malawi newsletter, 24 February 2016 .
Another early grammar, concentrating on the Kasungu dialect of the language, was Mark Hanna Watkins' A Grammar of Chichewa (1937). This book, the first grammar of any African language to be written by an American, was a work of cooperation between a young black PhD student and young student from Nyasaland studying in Chicago, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who in 1966 was to become the first President of the Republic of Malawi.Watkins (1937), p. 7.Wade-Lewis (2005). This grammar is also remarkable in that it was the first to mark the tones of the words. Modern monographs on aspects of Chichewa grammar include Mtenje (1986), Kanerva (1990), Mchombo (2004) and Downing & Mtenje (2017).
In recent years the language has changed considerably, and a dichotomy has grown between the traditional Chichewa of the villages and the language of city-dwellers.Batteen (2005).
Phonology
Vowels
Chewa has five short vowel sounds: a, ɛ, i, ɔ, u; these are written a, e, i, o, u. Long vowels are sometimes found, e.g. áákúlu 'big' (class 2), kufúula 'to shout'.Atkins (1950), p.201. When a word comes at the end of a phrase, its penultimate vowel tends to be lengthened,Downing & Mtenje (2017), pp. 228–9. except for non-Chewa names and words, such as or , in which the penultimate vowel always remains short. The added 'u' or 'i' in borrowed words such as 'laptop' or 'internet' tends to be very short.Downing & Mtenje (2017), p. 95: "A high vowel is very short and not very vowel-like, so inserting one leads to minimal deviation from the pronunciation of the word in the source language." +Chewa VowelsFrontCentralBackClose, (), ()Open-mid, (), ()Open, ()
Vowels are generally lengthened in the penultimate syllable of a prosodic phrase.Downing & Mtenje (2017), p. 12.
Consonants
Chewa consonants can be simple (directly preceding a vowel) or may be followed by w or y:
b, kh, g, f, m, s etc. bw, khw, gw, fw, mw, sw etc. bz, tch, j, fy, ny, sh etc.
In the orthography, the place of by is taken by the affricate bz, the place of gy is taken by j, and that of sy by sh.
Voiced and aspirated consonants, as well as [f] and [s], can also be preceded by a homorganic nasal: mb, ngw, nj, mv, nz etc. mph, , , mf, ns etc.
It is debated whether these are consonant clusters , or whether Chichewa has prenasalized, palatalized and labialized consonants . The most straightforward analysis is that they are clusters.Downing & Mtenje (2017: 93) The consonant inventory under a cluster analysis is as follows:
+Chewa consonants (cluster analysis)Downing & Mtenje (2017: 42–43) Bilabial Labio-dental Alveolar Post-alveolar Palatal Velar GlottalNasalmnnyng' Stoptenuisptkaspiratedph thkhimplosivebdvoiced(b)(d)gAffricatetenuis tschaspiratedtchvoiced dzjFricativevoiceless fssh(h)voiced(ŵ)Sources are contradictory as to whether ŵ is a fricative or a semivowel.vzSemivowelwyLiquid la/ra[ ~ ]
Consonants in parentheses are marginal or found mainly in loanwords. The lateral is an approximant word-initially and a flap medially.
If the more complex syllable onsets are analyzed as single consonants, the inventory is as follows: +Chewa consonants (unitary analysis)LabialAlveolarVelar/PalatalGlottalNasalmmymwnnyng' ng'w StoptenuisppypwttytwkkwaspiratedphphwththythwkhkhwPre-nasalizedaspiratedmphmphwnthnthynthwnkhnkhwvoicedbbwddydwggw(b)(d)Pre-nasalizedvoicedmbmbwndndyndwngngwAffricatetenuis tstswchaspirated pstchPre-nasalizedaspirated mpsntchvoiced bzdz(dzw)jPre-nasalizedvoiced mbz(ndz)njFricativevoiceless f(fy)fwsshsw(h)Pre-nasalized mfnsnswvoiced(ŵ)v(vy)vwz(zy)zwPre-nasalizedvoiced mvnznzwLateral approximant ~ flap l/r[ ~ ]lw/rw[ ~ ]Approximant wy
The spelling used here is that introduced in 1973,See Kishindo (2001), p.267. which is the one generally in use in the Malawi at the present time, replacing the Chinyanja Orthography Rules of 1931.Atkins (1950), p.200.
Notes on the consonants
In most words, Chewa b and d (when not prenasalised) are pronounced implosively, by sucking slightly.Scotton & Orr (1980), p.15; Atkins (1950), p.208. However, there is also a plosive b and d, mostly found in foreign words, such as 'bar', 'expensive' (from Afrikaans ) (in contrast to the implosive b and d in native words such as 'wound' and 'which cuts').Downing & Mtenje (2018), p. 43. A plosive d is also found in 'to stamp (a document)' and 'confident step'. The affricate sounds bv and pf were formerly commonly heard but are now generally replaced by v and f, e.g. 'problem', 'bone'. In the dictionary produced by the University of Malawi, the spellings bv and pf are not used in any of the headwords, but bv is used two or three times in the definitions. The combination bz is described by Atkins as an "alveolar-labialised fricative".Atkins (1950), p.208. The combination sounds approximately as or . Similarly ps is pronounced approximately as or . The sounds written ch, k, p and t are pronounced less forcibly than the English equivalents and generally without aspiration. Stevick notes that in relaxed speech, the first three are sometimes replaced with the voiced fricatives , and , and t can be heard as a voiced flap.Stevick (1965), p.xii. In the combination -ti (e.g. 'how many?'), t may be lightly aspirated. h is also used in Chewa but mostly only in loanwords such as 'hotel', 'horse', 'monthly allowance given to chiefs'. j is described by Scotton and Orr as being pronounced "somewhat more forward in the mouth" than in English and as sounding "somewhere between an English d and j".Scotton & Orr (1980), p.18. l and r are the same phoneme,Atkins (1950), p.207; Stevick et al. (1965), p.xii; Downing & Mtenje (2018), p. 43, quoting Price (1946). representing a retroflex tap , approximately between and . According to the official spelling rules, the sound is written as 'r' after 'i' or 'e', otherwise 'l'. It is also written with 'l' after a prefix containing 'i', as in 'tongue'.Kishindo (2001), p.268.See also Chirwa (2008). m is syllabic in words where it is derived from mu, e.g. 'relative' (3 syllables), 'teacher' (4 syllables), 'he gave him' (5 syllables). However, in class 9 words, such as 'gift', 'plate', or 'witch', and also in the class 1 word 'cat', the m is pronounced very short and does not form a separate syllable. In Southern Region dialects of Malawi, the syllabic m in words like 'lion' is pronounced in a homorganic manner, i.e. (with three syllables), but in the Central Region, it is pronounced as it is written, i.e. .Atkins (1950), p.209.