Bravanese dialect

rdf:langString Bravanese dialect

rdf:langString Bravanese

rdf:langString Chimwiini

rdf:langString Bravanese

rdf:langString Mwiini

rdf:langString Somalia

rdf:langString Bravanese, also called Chimwiini (ChiMwini, Mwiini, Mwini) or Chimbalazi is a variety of Swahili spoken by the Bravanese people, who are the predominant inhabitants of Barawa, or Brava, in Somalia. Maho (2009) considers it a distinct dialect, and it has been classified as a Northern Dialect of Swahili. However, it strongly distinguishes itself from standard Swahili under all linguistic considerations. Due to the ongoing Somali Civil War, most speakers have left the region and are scattered throughout the world in ex-refugee immigrant communities in places such as Columbus and Atlanta in the United States, London and Manchester in the United Kingdom, and Mombasa, Kenya. It has fewer than 15,000 speakers. Bravanese may have once served as a regional lingua franca due to the key coastal location of Barawa. One piece of linguistic evidence for this comes from morphological reduction. For example, it has a three-way tense system, which is simpler than that of neighboring Bantu dialects historically spoken in Somalia.

rdf:langString Niger-Congo

rdf:langString chim1312

rdf:langString Chimwiini

rdf:langString G.412

rdf:langString none

rdf:langString

rdf:langString Chimwiini