Malawi Blog on Learning Tumbuka

Monire monire! Muli uli?

Tobias Kumwenda has started a blog to teach Tumbuka ( via Global Voices):

The mission of this weblog is to teach those people who are not ChiTumbuka speakers located across the world, but have developed passion to learn this language.

A great idea. Keep up the good work!

See also Wikipedia:

The Tumbuka language is a Bantu language which is spoken in parts of Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania.

The language of the Tumbuka people is called chiTumbuka – the ‘chi’ in front of Tumbuka meaning ‘the language of’, similar to ‘ki’ in kiSwahili or ‘se’ in seTswana.

The World Almanac (1998) estimates approximately 2,000,000 Tumbuka speakers exist in the aforementioned three countries.

There are substantial differences between the form of Tumbuka spoken in urban areas (which borrows some words from Chichewa/Nyanja) and the “village” or “deep” Tumbuka spoken in villages. The Rumphi variant is often regarded as the most “linguistically pure”, and is sometimes called “real Tumbuka”.

Disclaimer: Coming from Blantyre, my Tumbuka knowledge is non-existent, except for some vocab overlaps with Chichewa, even though I went to college with lots of northern Malawians.