Tumbuka language

The Tumbuka language is a Bantu language which is spoken in the Northern Region of Malawi and also in the Lundazi district of Zambia. It is also known as Chitumbuka or Citumbuka — the chi- prefix in front of Tumbuka means "the language of", and is understood in this case to mean "the language of (the Tumbuka people)". Tumbuka belongs to the same language group (Guthrie Zone N) as Chewa and Sena.

The World Almanac (1998) estimates that there are approximately 2,000,000 Tumbuka speakers, though other sources estimate a much smaller number. The majority of Tumbuka speakers are said to live in Malawi. Tumbuka is the most widely spoken of the languages of Northern Malawi, especially in the Rumphi, Mzuzu, and Mzimba districts.

There are substantial differences between the form of Tumbuka spoken in urban areas of Malawi (which borrows some words from Swahili and Chewa) and the "village" or "deep" Tumbuka spoken in villages. The Rumphi variant is often regarded as the most "linguistically pure", and is sometimes called "real Tumbuka". The Mzimba dialect has been strongly influenced by Zulu (chiNgoni), even so far as to have clicks in words like chitha [ʇʰitʰa] "urinate", which do not occur in other dialects.

The Tumbuka language suffered during the rule of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, since in 1968 as a result of his one-nation, one-language policy it lost its status as an official language in Malawi. As a result, Tumbuka was removed from the school curriculum, the national radio, and the print media. With the advent of multi-party democracy in 1994, Tumbuka programmes were started again on the radio, but the number of books and other publications in Tumbuka remains low.