Languages in Zimbabwe – Get to know Shona
Shona is one of the 16 official languages in Zimbabwe. Get to know Shona! It’s one of my favourite languages. For your own information, I speak Shona. It’s my mother tongue, and I feel more comfortable sharing what I know from growing up and what I have learned through research.
Mutasa (1996) says approximately 75% of the Zimbabwean population speaks the Shona language belonging to the large family of Bantu languages.
Standardisation Almost Killed The Shona Language
Who Introduced Standardised Shona in Schools? Firstly, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. As we all know, the Shona language has several dialects. However, the colonial administration (1890-1980) did not incorporate all the Shona dialects into the school curricula.
Therefore, Standard Shona is the brainchild of missionaries who found it difficult to communicate with the local people and saw it fit to create a single language – Herald.co.zw. “Time To Stop The Standard Shona Phenomenon.”
Mhute (2016) says to “solve this problem” the Rhodesian administration invited a South African linguist, Clement Doke. They perceived him as an “expert” to standardise the word-division and spelling. That’s how Standardised Shona became the official language for writing school books and other material.
Was it a big mistake to standardise the Shona Languages In Zimbabwe?
The Standardisation of the Shona language was a setback as the policy watered down the language and almost killed it. The policy did not go well with the indigenous Zimbabwean people knowing how rich the Shona language is, with all its dialects and sub-dialects.
Shona Dialects that were thrown out of the Curricula
Making Standard Shona an official language was an enormous blunder. It meant the indigenous people were to write the type of Shona understood in the country while excluding other dialects like Zezuru, Kalanga, Korekore, Venda, Ndau and others.
Mhute (2016) says under normal circumstances, standardisation shouldn’t have caused people to give up more than half of their way of speaking, which is what happened. The Shona people had been speaking varieties (dialects) that are still independent languages.
The standardisation could have forced them “to speak in a prescribed way in spite of whether they really speak the same language or not which in turn leads to language shift and death.“
The language policy of the entire nation would result in the disappearance of motivation to continue with the old way of speaking which in turn leads to the death of that particular language or way of speaking.
The standardisation of the Shona language corrupted a once vibrant language. The opposite of promoting multilingualism and working to preserve the Shona dialects.
Hopefully, you found this post Languages in Zimbabwe – Get to know Shona informative. Please feel free to ask questions you may have.
Also, you are welcome to share any insights you have gotten over the years (from your personal experiences), please leave your comments below. I would love to hear all about it!
References
| Herald.co.zw, Time to Stop the Standard Shona Phenomenon, 23 June 2016. |
| Mutasa, David, The Problems of Standardizing Spoken Dialects: The Shona Experience, Volume 27, DO – 10.1080/10228199608566104, Language Matters, 2016. |
| Isaac Mhute, Standardisation A Considerable Force Behind Language Death: A Case of Shona, Journal of Education and Practice, Volume 7, No 9, 2016. |
14 Responses
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Thank you, Femia, for unravelling this information about dialects.
It now makes sense why people from different regions in Zimbabwe speak with a distinctive tone.
This post is not only informative but a good read.
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Thank you for writing this thought provoking article. I used to wonder why at school we were not able to write in our dialect Shona.
Now it makes a lot of sense. It was all stemming from the standardisation of Shona. I speak Karanga and people would literally laugh at you if you spoke in your vernacular.
This has affected many Zimbabweans view. Most are not proud of their dialects to the extent that speaking in English is seen as something superior, a status symbol of some sort.
Hello, Nyarai, thanks so much for taking the time to read my post and leave some invaluable feedback.
I hear you. I also speak Shona with a Karanga dialect and people used to laugh their lungs out when I opened my mouth to speak.
I didn’t know either why we had to write in standardised Shona at school and this watered down the importance of learning our mother language.
Thank you, Femia, for unravelling this information about dialects.
It now makes sense why people from different regions in Zimbabwe speak with a distinctive tone.
This post is not only informative but a good read.
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