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Kinyamwezi (pronunciation: ) is the language of the Nyamwezi people of Northwest central Tanzania. It can be classified as a being from the Bantu family of languages; belonging to Zone F22, according to Guthrie’s referential system of Bantu languages.

It is the mother-tongue of over one million people, 73% of whom live in the traditional area.

The major town in the Kinyamwezi region is Tabora. Linguistically, there is a dialect continuum with no strict border separating Kinyamwezi from its Northern neighbour Kisukuma. However, speakers recognize Kinyamwezi and Kisukuma as different languages belonging to two distinct people groups, each with their own ethnic identity.

Kinyamwezi has three dialects, listed as Nyanyembe, Takama (Garaganza) and Mweri (Sumbwa, Konongo, Kiya).

Language use is described by the ethnologue as ‘vigorous’.

Phonology
Kinyamwezi has the following seven vowels according to Maganga and Schadeberg (IPA transcription follows in square brackets where the symbol differs from those used by the authors).



There are two degrees of phonologically distinctive vowel length for each vowel. Long vowels are transcribed by repeating the vowel, for exampleː


 * 'to hit'       'to put'

The consonants can be listed as follows :

Stems with initial voiceless stops p, t and k, alternate with mh, nh, ŋh respectively when prenasalized.

Dahl’s rule applies to the following consonants: p, t, k, f, h, mh, nh, ŋh.

Tone: there are three basic surface tones, low, high and rising. In the text sample listed below, a high tone is marked with ́ whereas low tone goes unmarked. Rising tone is only found on long vowels and thus is marked by ́ on the second vowel.

Grammar
Kinyamwezi exhibits many of the expected Bantu typological characteristics such as 18 nouns classes (out of a possible 22), agglutination, derived and non-derived nouns, open syllable structure and Noun+Adjective, Noun+Demonstrative word order.

There is no dominant order for Subject, Verb (V) and Object (O) overall, but VO order is typical for Verb and Object.

Sample of Kinyamwezi text, the opening of an old Taborian song :