[6] In Eastern Zambia, Chitumbuka is spoken in the districts of Lumezi, Chasefu, Lundazi and Chama (Senga dialect).
[7] In Southern Tanzania, it is spoken in Mbeya and Njombe districts that share boundary with Northern Malawi.
[4] Senga (also called Tumbuka-Senga) is a dialect of Tumbuka[8] spoken in Zambia's Chama district and surrounding areas.
The majority of Tumbuka speakers live in Malawi and Zambia, with a smaller number in South Tanzania.
It was in 1968 when Hastings Kamuzu Banda removed the language as a result of his one-nation, one-language policy.
[4] Two systems of writing Tumbuka are in use: the traditional spelling (used for example in the Chitumbuka version of Wikipedia and in the newspaper Fuko), in which words such as banthu 'people' and chaka 'year' are written with 'b' and 'ch', and the new official spelling (used for example in the Citumbuka dictionary published online by the Centre for Language Studies and in the online Bible), in which the same words are written with 'ŵ' and 'c', e.g. ŵanthu and caka.
Tumbuka has a tonal accent but in a very limited way, in that every word, spoken in isolation, has the same falling tone on the penultimate syllable (which also coincides with stress).
Class 1 has the greatest variety of concords, differing for pronouns, subject prefix, object infix, numbers, adjectives, and possessives:[27][28][29] Other noun classes have a smaller variety of concords, as can be seen from the table below: The following is a list of phrases that can be used when one visits a region whose primary language is Tumbuka: Mwaŵa uli?
When a perfect tense is used it carries an implication that the resulting situation still exists at the time of speaking, for example: 'the pumpkins have spread (zathambalala) over the garden'.
[40] The present perfect can also be used in verbs expressing a current situation such as ndakhala 'I am sitting' or ndakondwa 'I am pleased'.
The remote perfect is used for events which happened some time ago but of which the effects still apply today, such as libwe lilikuwa 'the rock has fallen' or walikutayika 'he (has) died'.
[42] Compound tenses are also found in Tumbuka, such as wati wagona 'he had slept', wakaŵa kuti wafumapo 'he had just left' and wazamukuŵa waguliska 'he will have sold'.
[48] In the 1st person singular, ni-ku- and ni-ka- are shortened to nkhu- and nkha-: nkhuluta 'I am going', 'I go', nkhalutanga 'I used to go'.
[49] To make the negative of a verb in Tumbuka, the word yayi or cha(ra) is added at or near the end of the clause.
It seems that yayi is preferred by younger speakers:[50] With the present perfect tense, however, a separate form exists, adding -nda- and ending in -e:[51] Words of Ngoni (Zulu/Ndwandwe) origin found in Tumbuka: All Tumbuka dialects have to some extent been affected by the Ngoni language, most especially in Mzimba District of Malawi.