Digo language
| Digo | |
|---|---|
| Chidigo[citation needed] | |
| Native to | Kenya, Tanzania |
| Region | Mombasa and Kwale districts in Kenya; Muheza and Tanga districts in Tanzania |
| Ethnicity | Digo people |
Native speakers | 580,000 (2009–2019)[1] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | dig |
| Glottolog | digo1243 |
E.73[2] | |
Digo (Chidigo) is a Bantu language spoken primarily along the East African coast between Mombasa and Tanga by the Digo people of Kenya and Tanzania. The ethnic Digo population has been estimated at around 360,000 (Mwalonya et al. 2004), the majority of whom are presumably speakers of the language. All adult speakers of Digo are bilingual in Swahili, East Africa's lingua franca. The two languages are closely related, and Digo also has much vocabulary borrowed from neighbouring Swahili dialects.
Classification
 |
The classification and sub-classification of Digo provides a good example of the difficulty sometimes faced by linguists in differentiating
Dialects
Digo speakers recognise in turn a number of named varieties or dialects of their language. These are:
- Chinondo (Northern Digo), spoken along the south Kenya coast between Likoni (south Mombasa) and Msambweni (Hinnebusch 1973);
- Ungu (or Lungu, Southern Digo), spoken on the coastal strip south of Msambweni and across the border into northern Tanzania (Hinnebusch 1973);
- Ts’imba, spoken in the Shimba Hills of Kenya between Vuga in the east and Ng’onzini in the west (Walsh 2006); and
- Tsw’aka (or Chw’aka), spoken in and around the village of the same name on the Shimoni Peninsula of Kenya (Möhlig 1992, Nurse & Walsh 1992).
Tsw’aka was once thought to have been a local variety of the Vumba dialect of Swahili, but is now considered to be a variety of Digo in the process of shifting to Vumba. Some assimilated
Orthography and literature
Digo speakers usually write their language using an alphabet based on the
One hundred Digo proverbs have been collected and published by Margaret Wambere Ireri, with translations into Swahili, English, and French.[3]
References
- ^ a b Digo at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
- ^ Jouni Filip Maho, 2009. New Updated Guthrie List Online
- ^ Margaret Wambere Ireri. 2016. A COLLECTION OF 100 DIGO (MIJIKENDA) PROVERBS AND WISE SAYINGS. Web access
Further reading
- Hinnebusch, T.J. (1973). Prefixes, Sound Change, and Sub grouping in the Coastal Kenyan Bantu Languages (PhD dissertation). UCLA.
- Möhlig, W.J.G. (1992). "Language Death and the Origin of Strata: Two Case Studies of Swahili Dialects". In Brenzinger, M. (ed.). Language Death: Factual and Theoretical Explanations with Special Reference to East Africa. Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 157–179.
- Mwalonya, J.; Nicolle, A.; Nicolle, S.; Zimbu, J. (2004). Mgombato: Digo-English-Swahili Dictionary. Nairobi: BTL.
- Nicolle, Steve (2013). A Grammar of Digo: A Bantu language of Kenya and Tanzania. Dallas, TX: SIL International.
- Nurse, D.; Hinnebusch, T.J. (1993). Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. University of California Publications in Linguistics. Vol. 121. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520097759.
- Nurse, D.; Walsh, M.T. (1992). "Chifundi and Vumba: Partial Shift, No Death". In Brenzinger, M. (ed.). Language Death: Factual and Theoretical Explanations with Special Reference to East Africa. Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 181–121.
- Walsh, Martin T. (2006). "A Click in Digo and its Historical Interpretation". Azania. 41 (41): 158–166. S2CID 161227106.
External links
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