Shubi language

Shubi
RegionKagera Region in Tanzania
EthnicityShubi people
Native speakers
(153,000 cited 1987)
Language codes
ISO 639-3suj
Glottologshub1238
JD.64
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Shubi is a Bantu language spoken by the Shubi people in north-western Tanzania.: 168 

It may use labiodental plosives /p̪/, /b̪/ (sometimes written ȹ, ȸ) as phonemes, rather than as allophones of /p, b/. Peter Ladefoged wrote:

We have heard labiodental stops made by a Shubi speaker whose teeth were sufficiently close together to allow him to make an airtight labiodental closure. For this speaker this sound was clearly in contrast with a bilabial stop; but we suspect that the majority of Shubi speakers make the contrast one of bilabial stop versus labial-labiodental affricate (i.e. bilabial stop closure followed by a labiodental fricative), rather than bilabial versus labiodental stop.

Vocabulary

Many Bantu languages have a large set of lexical items for expressing time-frames by days (similar to English's yesterday, today, tomorrow, day after tomorrow). However, Shubi has a small set compared to other Bantu languages:

Shubi time-frame words
ShubiEnglish gloss
nyenkiloyesterday
mbwenutoday
nyenchatomorrow
bukiilethe following day
kalein the past

References

  1. ↑ Shubi at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ↑ Jouni Filip Maho, 2009. New Updated Guthrie List Online
  3. ↑ Polome, Andre Robert (1975). THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE BANTU LANGUAGES OF TANZANIA (PhD thesis). University of Texas at Austin. ISBN 9781083386878. Retrieved 4 October 2026 – via ProQuest.
  4. ↑ LINGUIST List 5.219: Labiodental nasals
  5. ↑ Lusekelo, Amani (17 December 2023). "The lexicalization of concepts of time in naming sequences of days in Tanzanian Bantu". Studies in African Linguistics. 52 (Supplement.13): 233–255. doi:10.32473/sal.52.Supplement.13.133797. Retrieved 4 October 2026.