Digo (Chidigo) is aBantu language spoken primarily along the East African coast betweenMombasa andTanga by theDigo people ofKenya andTanzania. The ethnic Digo population has been estimated at around 360,000 (Mwalonya et al. 2004), most of whom are presumably speakers of the language. All adult speakers of Digo are bilingual inSwahili, East Africa'slingua franca. The two languages are closely related, and Digo also has much vocabulary borrowed from neighbouring Swahili dialects.

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The classification and sub-classification of Digo provides a good example of the difficulty sometimes faced by linguists in differentiatinglanguages anddialects. Most contemporary authorities follow Nurse and Hinnebusch (1993) in classifying Digo as a dialect ofMijikenda, one of the constituent languages of theSabaki group ofNortheast Coast Bantu. The Mijikenda dialects are indeed mutually intelligible, though they are conventionally treated as separate languages. Digo is a member of the southern Mijikenda sub-group, and is most closely related to its neighboursDuruma andRabai. It is, however, felt by speakers to be sufficiently different from other Mijikenda dialects to deserve its ownorthography and literature.

Digo speakers recognise in turn a number of named varieties or dialects of their language. These are:

• Chinondo (Northern Digo), spoken along the south Kenya coast between Likoni (south Mombasa) and Msambweni (Hinnebusch 1973);
• Ungu (or Lungu, Southern Digo), spoken on the coastal strip south of Msambweni and across the border into northern Tanzania (Hinnebusch 1973);
• Ts’imba, spoken in the Shimba Hills of Kenya between Vuga in the east and Ng’onzini in the west (Walsh 2006); and
• Tsw’aka (or Chw’aka), spoken in and around the village of the same name on theShimoni Peninsula of Kenya (Möhlig 1992, Nurse & Walsh 1992).

Tsw’aka was once thought to have been a local variety of the Vumba dialect of Swahili, but is now considered to be a variety of Digo in the process of shifting to Vumba. Some assimilatedSegeju andDegere are also said to speak their own separate varieties of Digo, presumably as a consequence oflanguage shift (Nurse & Walsh 1992).

Digo speakers usually write their language using an alphabet based on theLatin alphabet used forSwahili, with additional combinations of letters representing some of the sounds that are distinctive to Digo (e.g. 'ph' for thevoiced bilabial fricative orapproximant). This has been developed further by the Digo Language and Literacy Project ofBible Translation and Literacy (East Africa). The project has produced basic literacy materials^[1] and published aDigo-English-Swahili Dictionary using the new orthography (Mwalonya et al. 2004) as well as a linguistic description inA Grammar of Digo (Nicolle 2013). The Digo New Testament was finished in 2007. All of these materials are based on the Northern Digo dialect spoken in Kenya.

One hundred Digo proverbs have been collected and published by Margaret Wambere Ireri, with translations into Swahili, English, and French.^[3]

• Hinnebusch, T.J. (1973).Prefixes, Sound Change, and Sub grouping in the Coastal Kenyan Bantu Languages (PhD dissertation). UCLA.
• Möhlig, W.J.G. (1992). "Language Death and the Origin of Strata: Two Case Studies of Swahili Dialects". In Brenzinger, M. (ed.).Language Death: Factual and Theoretical Explanations with Special Reference to East Africa. Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 157–179.
• Mwalonya, J.; Nicolle, A.; Nicolle, S.; Zimbu, J. (2004).Mgombato: Digo-English-Swahili Dictionary. Nairobi: BTL.
• Nicolle, Steve (2013).A Grammar of Digo: A Bantu language of Kenya and Tanzania. Dallas, TX: SIL International.
• Nurse, D.; Hinnebusch, T.J. (1993).Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. University of California Publications in Linguistics. Vol. 121. University of California Press.ISBN 9780520097759.
• Nurse, D.; Walsh, M.T. (1992). "Chifundi and Vumba: Partial Shift, No Death". In Brenzinger, M. (ed.).Language Death: Factual and Theoretical Explanations with Special Reference to East Africa. Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 181–121.
• Walsh, Martin T. (2006)."A Click in Digo and its Historical Interpretation".Azania.41 (41):158–166.doi:10.1080/00672700609480440.S2CID 161227106.

• Digo dictionary, grammar and publications

• Languages of Kenya
• Languages of Tanzania
• Northeast Coast Bantu languages

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