Kwangali language
Bantu language spoken in Nambia and Angola
Kwangali, or RuKwangali, is a Bantu language spoken by 85,000 people along the Kavango River in Namibia, where it is a national language, and in Angola. It is one of several Bantu languages of the Kavango which have click consonants; these are the dental clicks c and gc, along with prenasalization and aspiration.
Maho (2009) includes Mbunza as a dialect, but excludes Sambyu, which he includes in Manyo.
Phonology
Consonants
A dental click type [ǀ] may also be heard, being adopted from the neighboring Khoisan languages. The clicks may also tend to be heard as alveolar [!].
Vowels
Short vowels of /i e o u/ may also be pronounced as [ɪ ɛ ɔ ʊ].
References
Dammann, Ernst (1957). Studien zum Kwangali: Grammatik, Texte, Glossar. Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter
Derek Nurse & Gérard Philippson, The Bantu languages, 2003:569.
“Kwangali language” enters the record as bantu language spoken in Nambia and Angola. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kwangali, language and Bantu can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q36334. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009, 1957 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kwangali 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.