New Tumbuka Bible

The Tumbuka language is a Bantu language which is spoken in the Northern Region of Malawi and also in the Lundazi district of Zambia. It is also known as Chitumbuka or Citumbuka — the chi- prefix in front of Tumbuka means "the language of the", and is understood in this case to mean "the language of (the Tumbuka people)". Tumbuka belongs to the same language group (Guthrie Zone N) as Chewa and Sena. Two systems of writing Tumbuka are in use: the traditional spelling (used for example in the Chitumbuka version of Wikipedia and in the newspaper Fuko), in which words such as banthu 'people' and chaka 'year' are written with 'b' and 'ch', and the new official spelling (used for example in the Citumbuka dictionary published online by the Centre for Language Studies and in the online Bible), in which the same words are written with 'ŵ' and 'c', e.g. ŵanthu and caka. (The sound 'ŵ' is a closely rounded [w] pronounced with the tongue in the close-i position.) There is some uncertainty over where to write 'r' and where 'l', e.g. cakulya (Dictionary) or cakurya (Bible) 'food'. (In fact [l] and [r] are allophones of the same phoneme.) There is also hesitation between the spellings 'sk' and 'sy' (both miskombe and misyombe ('bamboo') are found in the Citumbuka dictionary).