Welcome to Martin Shumba's Shona
Language Pages.
Shona, or chiShona, is an African language spoken by nearly 80 percent of people
in Zimbabwe. There are clusters of Shona people or Shona speaking people in Botswana
and Mozambique, and in almost every country that shares borders with Zimbabwe. Shona
people had no input in drawing these borders.
There are many regional Shona dialects. Shona language presented here has been limited
to Shona words and sample sentences commonly used in the four major Shona dialects;
Karanga, Zezuru, Manyika and Korekore. Minor Shona language dialects have, to a
large extent, been ignored. However, they are still part of the Shona language.
Korekore is one minor Shona dialect that I have elected to include because of its
richness in vocabulary. There are numerous words that, as far as I know, are nonexistent
in the major dialects, but are common words in Korekore. Indoctrination by colonialists
has led to the general mindset of the average Zimbabwean that it is uncivilized
to speak in these dialects. It is for this reason that Shona people such as Ndau,
Korekore, and others, are ashamed to speak vernacular in public.
Written Shona is constantly evolving. Unfortunately the language is deteriorating
because of the tendency to assimilate foreign languages. It is no longer a pure
language as spoken by my grand parents. The corruption of the language is recent.
This website is not a Shona tutorial, but a good reference for Shona language as spoken in Zimbabwe. Website contains searchable Shona-English and English-Shona
dictionaries and includes general information about the
language. We are continually adding more words to the dictionaries. See
additonal notes on working with these pages.
Topics covered include the following:
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Shona-English
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This page contains a searchable Shona-English dictionary for converting
Shona words to English.
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English-Shona
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This page contains a searchable English-Shona dictionary for converting
common English words to Shona.
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Examples
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This page has a pretty good number of sample sentences in Shona with
English translations.
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Cousins
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This page shows how gender affects the way cousins are addressed or described.
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Numbers
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This page covers the subject of numbers in Shona and is mainly for those
unfamiliar with the subject.
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Shona Names
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Here you will find common Shona names of animals, birds, fish and reptiles. |
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More English words have been added to the English-Shona dictionary. You now can
search English words from aardvark to lying.
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Shona Names page has been revised to add more common names of animals, birds and
insects.
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