John C Rigdon

English / Chichewa Dictionary John C Rigdon

Chewa, also known as Nyanja, is a Bantu language spoken by 12 million people in much of Southern, Southeast and East Africa, namely the countries of Malawi and Zimbabwe, where it is an official language and Mozambique and Zambia where it is a recognised minority language. The noun class prefix chi- is used for languages, so the language is usually called Chichewa and Chinyanja (spelled Cinianja in Mozambique). In Malawi, the name was officially changed from Chinyanja to Chichewa in 1968 at the insistence of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda (himself of the Chewa people), and this is still the name most commonly used in Malawi today. In Zambia, the language is generally known as Nyanja or Cinyanja/Chinyanja '(language) of the lake' (referring to Lake Malawi).

This English - Chichewa and Chichewa - English Dictionary (Chingerezi / Chichewa / Dikishonale), contains 15,000 entries. It is based on our Words R Us - Wordnet implementation (www.wordsrus.info) which enables pairing the Chichewa language with hundreds of others. It was created using dozens of sources including academic papers on the language as well as native speakers.