Kimbundu
| Kimbundu | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Angola | |
| speaker | 4 million | |
| Linguistic classification |
||
| Official status | ||
| Other official status in |
 Angola
|
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
- |
|
| ISO 639 -2 |
kmb |
|
| ISO 639-3 | ||
Kimbundu (sometimes inappropriately referred to as Mbundu or Luanda Mbundu ) is a Bantu language native to northern Angola , spoken by the Ambundu , who make up about 25% of Angola's population.
The main distribution area of the Kimbundu are the capital Luanda and the neighboring provinces of Bengo , Cuanza Norte and Malange and the northern part of the province of Cuanza Sul .
The language was recorded in writing by Capuchin and Jesuit missionaries, albeit partially morphologically and grammatically incorrect. They wrote the first grammar and translated the Bible and other religious scriptures into Kimbundu.
This was also learned by parts of the Portuguese who lived there during the colonial period in its area of distribution. Many Kimbundu words found their way into colloquial Portuguese, as illustrated by the works of the Angola-Portuguese writer Luandino Vieira. In the 1960s and 1970s, songs on Kimbundu, such as Monami and Kamba miami , were common knowledge in Angola and were included in their repertoire by various (mostly multiracial ) music groups.
During the colonial days, however, kimbundu speakers of the urban middle classes, especially in Luanda, began to prevent their children from using the kimbundu so that they could learn better Portuguese. This tendency has continued and expanded after independence. This is why the vast majority of the population in Luanda now only speaks Portuguese in everyday life. Of course, this is also due to the fact that a large part of the current residents of Luanda have immigrated from other parts of the country in the last decades and do not have Kimbundu as their mother tongue, but in the case of the Bakongo the Kikongo or Lingala , in the case of the Ovimbundu des Umbundu etc. The result is that today's children, adolescents and young adults who are ethnically Ambundu often neither speak nor understand Kimbundu - often not even if their families come from areas in which Kimbundu is spoken exclusively or predominantly.
At the same time, however, the Angolan government has declared the Kimbundu, as well as the languages of other numerically significant ethnic groups, to be a "national language" (língua nacional). B. in the form of regular radio broadcasts on Kimbundu.
From a linguistic point of view, the Kimbundu is related to the Bantu language Umbundu , which is also spoken in Angola , but not so closely that a more than fragmentary understanding between speakers of both languages would be possible.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ See for example Luuanda (sic!), Lisbon: Caminho, 2004 or A cidade ea infância , ibid., 2007