Ndebele
Claire Bowern and Victoria Lotridge (eds.)
Harvard University
This grammar is a sketch of the essential features of Ndebele grammar. Ndebele is spoken by approximately 1.5 million people in Zimbabwe and up to another half million in the Transvaal district of the Republic of South Africa. It is a member of the Nguni subgroup of Bantu, along with Xhosa, Zulu and Swati. Data from this sketch were collected from a speaker of Ndebele during Harvard University's linguistic field methods course in Spring 2000, taught by Dr Lisa Lavoie. The dialect described is Zimbabwe Ndebele.
The class wrote the sketch jointly, based on final research papers for the course. The sketch was then edited into a manuscript and checked for consistency. Those contributing to the sketch were (besides the main editors): Emily Alling, Gorm Amand, Luce Aubrey, Gülsat Aygen, Dominika Baran, Maryanne Cockerill, Ju-Eun Lee, Bekezela Ncube, Balkiz Öztürk and Pawel Nowak. The sketch covers the basics of phonology, morphology of nouns and verbs, concord and noun class membership, the tense/aspect/mood system and basic syntax, including subordination and questions. There is a fully glossed text which illustrates many of the points made in the sketch.
At the time of writing the authors and editors were undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard University.
ISBN 9783895864650. Languages of the World/Materials 416. 96pp. 2002.
