Kalanga language
Bantu language of Zimbabwe and Botswana
Kalanga, or TjiKalanga (in Zimbabwe), is a Bantu language spoken by the Kalanga people in Botswana and Zimbabwe which belongs to the Shonic (Shona-Nyai) branch of the Bantu languages, within the Niger-Congo languages. It has an extensive phoneme inventory, which includes palatalised, velarised, aspirated and breathy-voiced consonants, as well as whistled sibilants.
Kalanga is recognized as an official language by the Zimbabwean Constitution of 2013 and is taught in schools in areas where its speakers predominate. The iKalanga language is closely related to the Nambya, TshiVenda, and KheLobedu languages of Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Classification and varieties
Linguists place Kalanga (S.16 in Guthrie's classification) and Nambya (in the Hwange region of Zimbabwe) as the western branch of the Shona group (or Shonic, or Shona-Nyai) group of languages, collectively coded as S.10.
Kalanga has a dialectal variation between its Botswana and Zimbabwean varieties and they use slightly different orthographies. Historically, Wentzel mentioned Kalanga (proper) and Lilima (Tjililima/Humbe) on the west.
TTjiLilima
TjiLilima is the Kalanga language dialect popularly used in everyday speech as well as in a lot of documentation made and developed in Botswana. The use and rise of this specific dialect was brought on by the population group that uses it. This population group includes people who come from the Southern parts of the Tutume district, the Tonota district as well as those from the country's North east district.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q33672. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kalanga language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.