About Shona Language
According to Wikipedia.org, Shona is a Bantu language and is spoken by the Shona people of Zimbabwe. The language was codified by the colonial government and became popular during the 1950s. According to Ethnologue, the language was spoken in the Zezuru, Korekore, and Karanga dialects. It is spoken by 7.5 million people. Shona has Manyika and Ndau dialects and is spoken by 1,025,000 and 2,380,000 people. It is called Shona and is similar to the Ndau (Eastern Shona) and Karanga (Western Shona). Shona is a written standard language and became popular in the early 20th century. In the 1920s, the Rhodesian administration offered schoolbooks and other materials in Shona. The first novel in Shona was published in 1957. It is taught in the schools and has literature in the monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. The Standard Shona has a specific dialect and is spoken by the Karanga people of Masvingo Province. Shona dialects are taught in local schools.
About Maori Language
According to Wikipedia.org, Maori is the official language in the Cook Islands and New Zealand. The total number of Maori speakers is around 100,000 to 150,000. It has a distinctive nature as compared to other Polynesian languages. Maori contains five vowels and each one of them is either long or short. There are ten consonants in total that include h, k, m, n, ng, p, r, t, and w. You will rarely find any prefixes and suffixes while the nouns, verbs, and tenses are indicated with syntax. Traditionally Maori didn’t have a fixed writing system but it is now written in Latin script. The modern text of Maori features long and short vowels. A lot of older texts are based on long vowels and double letters.
