What's Ronga?
Google the word “Ronga” and it
won’t be long before you are directed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronga_language;
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Ronga;
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ronga;
or https://omniglot.com/writing/ronga.htm.
But it’s quite striking that so little is said about this language. For
example, Wikipedia says that “Ronga (XiRonga; sometimes ShiRonga or GiRonga) is
a south-eastern Bantu language in the Tswa–Ronga family spoken just south of
Maputo in Mozambique. It extends a little into South Africa. It has about
650,000 speakers in Mozambique and a further 90,000 in South Africa, with
dialects including Konde, Putru and Kalanga”.
Being a native speaker of Ronga myself, I wonder who calls it “GiRonga”, since I’ve never heard that. I also wonder what the “Konde” dialect mentioned by Wikipedia is, because I’ve never heard that either. According to the proceedings of the III Workshop on the Standardization of the Orthography of Mozambican Languages published in 2012 (Ngunga and Faquir 2012, 242), Ronga has four dialects, namely: Xilwandle, Xinondrwana, Xizingili and Xihlanganu. Yet, even this statement needs to be taken with a grain of salt because there is little or no (up-to-date) research confirming the existence of such dialects today and in the regions in which they are said to be spoken. There’s often a mere repetition of what has been written about this language. For example, the Oxford online dictionaries provide the following definitions of “ronga”:
• 1 A language belonging to the south-east Bantu group and the Tsonga subgroup, spoken by a people living in the Delagoa Bay area of southern Mozambique.
• 2 A member of a Bantu-speaking people living in the Delagoa Bay area of southern Mozambique.
But again, as a native speaker of this language, I wonder where Delagoa Bay is in Mozambique…Oh, hang on a second! I know, it’s what later became known as Lourenço Marques, currently Maputo. I just wanted to highlight how scanty the information about this language and its speakers is.
Not that there hasn’t been sufficient in interest in Ronga. In fact, glottolog indicates dozens of works on Ronga language since the 19th century. Only that (oh what a pity!) these sources are almost unavailable today. This begs the question, What is Ronga really? What’s the relationship between Ronga and Tswa or Tsonga, the languages it’s often said to be mutually intelligible with? We’ll try to answer these questions next time.
Being a native speaker of Ronga myself, I wonder who calls it “GiRonga”, since I’ve never heard that. I also wonder what the “Konde” dialect mentioned by Wikipedia is, because I’ve never heard that either. According to the proceedings of the III Workshop on the Standardization of the Orthography of Mozambican Languages published in 2012 (Ngunga and Faquir 2012, 242), Ronga has four dialects, namely: Xilwandle, Xinondrwana, Xizingili and Xihlanganu. Yet, even this statement needs to be taken with a grain of salt because there is little or no (up-to-date) research confirming the existence of such dialects today and in the regions in which they are said to be spoken. There’s often a mere repetition of what has been written about this language. For example, the Oxford online dictionaries provide the following definitions of “ronga”:
• 1 A language belonging to the south-east Bantu group and the Tsonga subgroup, spoken by a people living in the Delagoa Bay area of southern Mozambique.
• 2 A member of a Bantu-speaking people living in the Delagoa Bay area of southern Mozambique.
But again, as a native speaker of this language, I wonder where Delagoa Bay is in Mozambique…Oh, hang on a second! I know, it’s what later became known as Lourenço Marques, currently Maputo. I just wanted to highlight how scanty the information about this language and its speakers is.
Not that there hasn’t been sufficient in interest in Ronga. In fact, glottolog indicates dozens of works on Ronga language since the 19th century. Only that (oh what a pity!) these sources are almost unavailable today. This begs the question, What is Ronga really? What’s the relationship between Ronga and Tswa or Tsonga, the languages it’s often said to be mutually intelligible with? We’ll try to answer these questions next time.
Comentários
Enviar um comentário