Pronunciation 2: nasals

Today, we are looking at the nasal sounds of Giriama. These are the sounds made by air coming out of your nose, but not your mouth.

Tenses 1: na

Today, we are going to learn how to include tenses with our verbs - to talk about things that happened in the past, are currently happening, or will happen in the future, as well as things that usually happen.

Numbers 1-10

I have found a video of Giriama children explaining numbers and colours.

Subject concords 2

In Part 1, we looked at the Giriama words for I, you, he and she. In this post, we will look at the subject concords used for we and they.

Subject concords 1

The subject is the part of the sentence which is doing the action: I read, you dance, Chengo sleeps.

In English, the subject is a separate word (called a pronoun). In Giriama, as in Swahili and other Bantu languages, the subject is attached to the beginning of the verb (and called a concord).

Pronunciation 1: vowels

Vowels

Unlike in English, the vowels are pretty simple. There are 5 of them, and they are pronounced similarly to the vowels of Swahili or Spanish.

Welcome to Teach Yourself Giriama!

A few facts about the Giriama language.

Map of Kenya showing the location of Giryama speakers
From The Verbal Morphology of Kigiryama - see Resources

Giriama is one of the Mijikenda dialects spoken in south-east Kenya near the coast. It is spoken by approximately half a million people.

It is a Bantu language, related to Swahili, with perhaps 60-70% of Giriama words coming from the same roots. (For comparison, the same source puts English as sharing 60% of its vocabulary with German. French and Spanish share 70%, Spanish and Italian share 80%, and Spanish and Portuguese share 90%.)

You will also see the language name written as Giryama or Kigiriama. 'Ki' is a prefix (more on these in future) which in this case is used for languages. So Kigiriama means 'language of the Giriama', just as 'Kiswahili' means 'Swahili language'. You don't need to use the 'ki' when talking about the language in English - it's nothing to do with respect, it's just a grammatical thing, which is meaningless in English.

Its writing system is based on the Latin alphabet, just like English and other European writing systems, and most other Bantu writing systems. However, it does not seem to be very widely used. As far as I can tell from abroad, there are very few publications in Giriama. Most (?) higher education is in Swahili or English; if you are well enough educated to want newspapers, novels and textbooks, you will be able to read the existing Swahili ones, so there appears to be little demand for Kigiriama publications at present.

See Resources for what I have been able to get hold of so far.