Zigua language

Zigula
Mushunguli
Native to	Tanzania, Somalia
Ethnicity	Zigula people, Somali Bantu
Native speakers	380,000 (1993–2006)
Language family	Niger–Congo Atlantic–Congo Benue–Congo Bantoid Bantu Northeast Coast Bantu Seuta Zigula
Dialects	Mushunguli Zigula
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Either:  – Zigula  – Mushunguli
Glottolog	zigu1244
Guthrie code	G.31,311
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Zigula (Zigua, Chizigua) is a Bantu language of Tanzania and of Somalia, where it is known as Mushunguli (Mushungulu). It is best known for the Mushunguli dialect.

Mushunguli is spoken by about 23,000 people from the Bantu ethnic minority of southern Somalia, in Jamaame, Kismayo, Mogadishu, and the Juba River valley.

It shows affinities with other adjacent Bantu varieties. In particular, Mushunguli shares strong lexical and grammatical similarities with the language of the Zigua people who inhabit Tanzania, one of the areas in south-eastern Africa where many Bantu in Somalia are known to have been captured from as slaves during the 19th century.Ethnologue notes that the Mushunguli in Tanzania are the Wazegua.

Many Mushunguli Bantu men also speak as working languages the Afro-Asiatic Maay and Somali languages of their Somali neighbors.

There is no official or traditional orthography for Mushunguli. However, spelling practices from related Bantu languages can easily be adopted to render the language with minimal phonetic diacritics.

The fricatives [z] and [s] freely vary with [ð] and [θ], respectively.

Vowel length is not distinctive, but phonetic length is especially associated with falling tones as in chîga 'leg'. The tone system is similar to that of Tanzanian Zigua.

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