Did you know:

The Shona, or at least the ancestors of the people called Shona today, especially the Zezuru, only arrived in Zimbabwe in the late 1600s to 1700s as recorded in Portuguese documents.

Once the ancestors of the Shona had settled in Zimbabwe, they obviously intermixed and intermarried with the Kalanga who were then inhabiting the whole of the Zimbabwean plateau, though concentrated mostly in the south and south-west of the country where the land was less humid..

and suitable as grazing land, mining and other activities. In this way the Karanga language came into being, and for those who know the various Shona dialects and Kalanga, they know that Karanga is more a variant of TjiKalanga than it is of say Zezuru or Manyika. Some have...

argued that Kalanga is a variant of Karanga that came about as a result of an intermix between Karanga and Ndebele in the 19th Century, but what they overlook is the fact that TjiKalanga was the state language of the Maphungubgwe, Monomotapa, Togwa and Lozwi Kingdoms, as well as

the liturgical language of the state religion - the Mwali Religion - dating back to at least the 10th century, and still is today.

Secondly, as we saw above how the so-called Standard Shona was created, Karanga - being a mixture of Kalanga and the Shona dialects - was incorporated into the new language. As a result, naturally thousands of Kalanga words, which were now forming the Karanga language, entered...

into the new language. I have often been amazed by those who say that Kalanga is a Shona dialect, and wondered if they have tried to compare Kalanga with Zezuru. Whilst Zezuru, and many of the Shona dialects are intelligible to the Kalanga, TjiKalanga is in many cases...

unintelligible to the Shona.

Thirdly, TjiKalanga language would have heavily infiltrated the Shona dialects during the one hundred and fifty years that the Lozwi, of whose TjiKalanga was a state language, were the rulers of all tribes then inhabiting the Zimbabwean Tableland.

It is very common for the language of the rulers to infiltrate the languages of those upon whom they are ruling. This was an easy process since then no chief could rule without the previous sanction of the Kalanga-Lozwi rulers, and in many cases the chiefs were of Bukalanga...

stock, which is even why many Shona chiefs are originally Kalanga-Lozwi. A similar scenario can be pointed out to in our era. Under the overlordship of Ndebele and Tswana chiefs, we have seen TjiKalanga driven to the verge of extinction as these chiefs insist on the use of...

IsiNdebele and Setswana in their courts, or their languages inflitrates the languages of those upon whom they are ruling.