Background

Language Family: Niger-Congo / Atlantic-Congo / Volta-Congo / Benue-Congo / Bantoid / Bantu / Northeast Coast Bantu / Sabaki / Swahili / Mwani

Mwani is also commonly known as Kimwani and is spoken in the Cabo Delgado province of Mozambique.
Mwani and Swahili are not mutually intelligible (Floor 2010, 4).

Phonology

Consonants

There is some uncertainty regarding the phonemic status of prenasalized stops. Petzell (2002) as well as Ngungo and Faquir (2012) do not include them (p. 91; p. 20). Ngungo and Faquir (2012) claim that prenasalization of voiced stops (like labialization and palatalization) phonetically result from voiced stops following (homoorganic) nasal consonants (pp. 21-22). Floor (2010) and Abudo et al. (2010), on the other hand, do include prenasalized stops as phonemic. I have opted to include the prenasalized stops in the analysis below.
- Ngungo and Faquir (2012) explain that in some instances where voiced stops are preceded underlyingly with the prefix “mu-” (marked by ⟨n⟩ when preceding non-bilabial stops), vowel elision of the /u/ (which is orthographically omitted) often occurs resulting in syllabic nasal + voiced stop sequences rather than prenasalized voiced stops. This ultimately means that the language is somewhat compromised as conflation between syllabic nasals preceding voiced stops and prenasalized stops cannot be avoided.
[r] is generally considered to be an allophone of /l/ (Ngungo and Faquir 2012, 21). Abudo et al. (2010) explain that in most dialects, the contrast is not maintained. It is however maintained in the Kiwibu dialect, which is said to be the prestige dialect (Floor 2010, 4). It is not uncommon for more formal dialects to preserve phonemic distinctions for which other dialects have lost. I have chosen to only represent /l/ below.
/ɡ/ is rather marginal (Petzell 2002, 90).
/h/ only occurs in Arabic loanwords (Ngungo and Faquir 2012, 21), and when it does occur, it is often elided (Petzell 2002, 90).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar
Stops (plain)	p b	t d			k ɡ
Stops (prenasalized)	ᵐb	ⁿd	ⁿdʒ		ᵑɡ
Affricates			tʃ dʒ
Fricatives	f v	s z	ʃ
Nasals	m	n		ɲ	ŋ
Approximants	w	l		j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless, whereas those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

The phonemic status of nasal vowels is also somewhat unclear. Ngungo and Faquir (2012) and Abudo et al. (2010) argue for nasal vowels, whereas the other sources do not. Petzell (2002) states that the contrast seems to be maintained only when speakers of the language speak words adapted from Portuguese (the official language of Mozambique), but not when speaking Mwani. All vowels, however, tend to experience some nasalization preceding NC sequences, which is also noted in Nurse, Hinnebusch, and Philipson (1993; as cited in Petzell 2002, 91–92). I have chosen to proceed with the analysis not accounting for nasal vowels.
Vowel length is not a contrastive feature of Mwani (Ngungo and Faquir 2012, 19–20). However, it can phonetically arise in derived Arabic loanwords, where intervocalic /h/ is often omitted (and generally not orthographically marked).
Unlike many Bantu languages, Mwani is said to have a pitch accent rather than tone (Petzell 2002, 91–92). There is, however, some gray area here as some sources note the existence of tone. Floor (2010) explains that Mwani doesn’t necessarily have productive lexical tone, but it does have grammatical tone, denoting verb tense (p. 4). I have decided to proceed with the language without accounting for tone.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

Vowels are marked with an acute accent (´) in some borrowings and nouns with nonstandard pronunciations. For some verb forms, the acute accent (´) and circumflex (^) are used to indicate pitch accent and verb tense (Ngungo and Faquir 2012, 25). As described above (see Vowels), accented vowels will be transcribed to their plain representations.
Vowels may also be marked with a tilde (◌̃). However, this convention is most likely adapted/preserved from Portuguese borrowings (Abudo et al. 2010), given that it’s present in 0.4% of the Crúbadán corpus. Since nasal vowels do not seem to be contrastive in Mwani, I have transcribed the nasal vowels to their oral counterparts in the rule set.

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
b	/b/
c	/tʃ/
d	/d/
e	/e/
f	/f/
g	/ɡ/
h	/h/	only appears in loanwords
i	/i/
j	/dʒ/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
p	/p/
r	/l/	may be realized as [r]
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
v	/v/
w	/w/
y	/j/
z	/z/
Digraph
ch	/tʃ/
mb	/ᵐb/
nd	/ⁿd/
nj	/ⁿdʒ/
ng	/ᵑɡ/
ng’	/ŋ/
ny	/ɲ/
sh	/ʃ/

Misc. Rules

Labialization of consonants preceding /w/ is common (Petzell 2002, 92).
Palatalization also occurs before /j/ (ibid.).

References

Abudo, Faque, Maria Aquimo João, Sousa Bacar, Cavanto Buana, and António Francisco de Sousa. 2010. Vocabulário de Kimwami. SIL Moçambique.

Floor, Sebastian. 2010. Mwani Grammatical Sketch. Cabo Delgado, Mozambique: SIL Mozambique.

Ngungo, Armindo, and Osvaldo G. Faquir. 2012. “Padronização Da Ortografia de Línguas Moçambicanas: Relatório Do Iii Seminário,” 17–34.

Nurse, Derek, Thomas J. Hinnebusch, and Gérard Philipson. 1993. Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. Edited by Thomas J. Hinnebusch and Gérard Philipson. University of California Press.

Petzell, Malin. 2002. “A Sketch of Kimwani, a Minority Language of Mozambique.” Africa & Asia: Göteborg Working Papers on Asian and African Languages 2: 88–110. http://www.african.gu.se/aa.

Mwani