A Grammar of Chingoni
Michigan State University
Chingoni, or Ngoni of Tanzania, is a Bantu language (Guthrie’s N.12) spoken in Southern Tanzania by approximately 200,000 people. It is considered part of the Rufiji language group. This study is a grammatical sketch of the language spoken around Peramiho.
The study is divided into four chapters. Chapter One provides introductory remarks including sociolinguistic facts about the language and a brief history of the speech community. It explains why in spite of its South African Nguni name, the language is genetically an Eastern African language. Chapter Two presents the phonological system, describing the sounds, tones, phonotactics and some phonological processes including hiatus resolution, vowel harmony, imbrication and reduplication. The third chapter deals with the morphological structure of Chingoni words. It describes the morphology of nouns, verbs, adjectives, quantifiers and other nominal modifiers, adverbs, pronouns, and ideophones. Bantu features such as noun classes, agreement affixes, tense and aspect marking, and verbal extensions are discussed in this chapter. The syntax of Chingoni is sketched in the fourth chapter. It discusses word order and clause structure, and describes various syntactic phenomena such as agreement, negation, and question formation. Following this description, there is a sample text with interlinear translation and a short Chingoni-English word list appears at the end.
ISBN 9783895868467. Languages of the World/Materials 425. 120pp. 2003.