Shona

How Clement Doke shaped written Shona

In the 1920s the Rhodesian administration had to prepare schoolbooks in several languages and dialects and asked the South African linguist Clement Doke for a recommendation. From 1931 to 1955 Unified Shona was written in an alphabet he developed, with special letters such as ȿ and ɀ. In 1955 those gave way to plain Latin letters and digraphs, so sv and zv now stand in their place. The orthography and grammar were fixed in the 1950s.

The first novel in Shona, Solomon Mutswairo's Feso, appeared in 1957, and hundreds of novels, story collections and books of poetry have followed. Schools teach Shona, but after the first few grades it is the medium only for Shona grammar and literature.

Why Zezuru became the standard

Standard Shona is based on Zezuru, spoken in Mashonaland East and central Zimbabwe around Harare. The choice has led to the decline and possible extinction of related varieties now called Shona dialects. Karanga is spoken around Masvingo and in the Midlands, Korekore in the north around Mvurwi, Bindura and Mount Darwin. Maho counted Korekore, Zezuru, Manyika, Karanga and Ndau as distinct languages within the cluster in 2009. Doke's survey of 1930 remains the last systematic study of the varieties, so many of the sub-dialects it lists should be treated with caution.

Where Shona whistles

Shona has whistled sibilants, written sv, zv, tsv and dzv, which drew attention abroad in 2006 over how to pronounce a politician's surname. Every syllable ends in a vowel, so mangwanani, morning, divides as ma.ngwa.na.ni. The letters l, q and x appear only in loanwords.