Shona (redirected from Shonas)

Shona

Cluster of Bantu-speaking peoples living in eastern Zimbabwe, west-central Mozambique, and southern Zambia. Numbering about nine million, they cultivate corn, millet, and sorghum and keep cattle. Their villages consist of mud-and-wattle huts, granaries, and common cattle kraals. Shona traditional culture, now fast declining under Christianizing and urbanizing influences, was noted for its ironwork, pottery, and music. Magic, witchcraft, and sorcery remain important. The Shona are believed to have built Great Zimbabwe.

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Shona 

a group of closely related languages, the most important of which are Karanga and Zezuru, of the south-central Bantu languages. According to a 1970 estimate, the Shona languages are spoken in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Mozambique by 1.5 million people.

The Shona languages have five vowels. Consonants include a voiced bilabial implosive and a voiced dental implosive; nasalization, aspiration, and voicing of consonants occur at morpheme boundaries. Nouns are divided into 21 classes that form a system of concordances; in addition to augmentative, diminutive, and locative classes, the Shona languages have two special classes comprising proper names, kinship terms, and the names of totemic animals. The classes are marked by prepositive monosyllables. Verbs are conjugated by means of affixes. There are many ideo-phones. In the Shona languages, word order is fixed in the pattern subject-predicate-object. Attributes are postpositional; that is, they follow the modified word.

REFERENCES

Marconnès, F. A Grammar of Central Koranga. [Johannesburg, 1931.]
O’Neil, J. A. A Shona Grammar: Zezuru Dialect. London, 1935.
Shona: Basic Course. Washington, D.C., 1965.
Barnes, B. H. A Vocabulary of the Dialects of Mashonaland. London, 1932.

N. V. OKHOTTNA