A major ethnic group and language in Zimbabwe and parts of Mozambique and Botswana, with millions of native speakers in southern Africa.
The word 'Shona' likely comes from the root meaning 'people of the wild' or 'wild people' in the Bantu language family, though etymologists debate the exact origin. The name gained prominence as the group's self-identifier and was formalized during Zimbabwe's colonial period.
Shona is a Bantu language with a complex noun class system where every noun belongs to a category that affects how other words around it change—it's one of the most grammatically elaborate systems in world languages, with up to 20 different noun classes compared to English's near-zero system.
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