Chinyanja/Chichewa (N31)

Abstract This chapter provides a survey of Chinyanja/Chichewa, a language spoken mainly in Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique. It presents a socio-historical background, followed by a discussion of the language’s phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. For phonetics/phonology, the focus is on syllable structure, tone in the verbal system, and ideophones; morphology provides a sketch of the word formation processes and verbal structure; and syntax, an examination of morphology/syntax interactions and aspects of question formation; in semantics the chapter sketches how idioms are interpreted. Finally, it discusses how Chichewa/Chinyanja interacts with Bantu and non-Bantu languages. The chapter concludes that while there has been tremendous advance in the study of the structural aspects of the language since early missionary linguistic efforts, further research is needed to shed more light on how the language interacts with other languages