Question
Updated on
25 Jun 2016
- Arabic
-
English (US)
Question about Kiswahili
Mama yangu au wangu ?
Mama yangu au wangu ?
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- English (UK)
- Kiswahili
Obviously wrong
Explanation is not enough
Written in a language I can't understand
Answer is not related to the question
Other reason
- English (US)
- Japanese
Proper Kiswahili uses wangu for people/living things and yangu for things but recently people use yangu for living things too.
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- English (UK)
- Kiswahili
Well mama stands for mother. When you say wangu it's like making it into the plural form which is incorrect because a mother is only one. Mama yangu = my mother
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- Arabic
- English (UK)
- Kiswahili Near fluent
@mone412: No actually some words like mama, baba and rafiki are different because we use yangu instead of wangu for them in Kiswahili sanifu. I don't know the reason why but it's like this.
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- English (US)
- Japanese
@dharmayana4: my Kiswahili teacher from Tanzania who speaks the genuine Kiswahili says that it's a common mistake that has become overused to the point that many people don't know how it's actually used anymore. But it's possible that it's different regionally.
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- English (UK)
- Kiswahili Near fluent
@mone412: Hmm well I disagree with your teacher. If you ask any native speaker, or even read news articles in Kiswahili, even those from Tanzania, you'll see that for words like mama, baba, dada, kaka, ndugu and rafiki, we use yangu and not wangu. This isn't a regional difference.
Also there's nothing like genuine Kiswahili. Dialects are not less genuine than standard varieties.
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- English (US)
One reason is because words like mama baba dada kaka pluralize like nouns in class 9/10, meaning the singular is the same as the plural, so using yangu or zangu shows if the noun is singular or plural. For example it is obvious that kaka yangu is singular while kaka zangu is plural. If it was kaka wangu, you wouldn't know whether or not you were saying my brother or my brothers. This is not always the case though (mbwa wangu, mbwa wangu).
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- Danish
- English (US)
So as someone who has grown up in Tanzania and currently lives here, the correct form would be "mama yangu". While it is true that mama belongs to m/wa class where you would usualy use "wangu" in singular form, there is a sub-category in this class that can be refered to as family/or personal relationships. For this sub-category the correct agreement in singular is "yangu". The category mostly consists words that describe who someone is to you fx. mama, baba, dada, bibi, rafiki. Most of these exceptions do not start with m/wa. But if you are ever in doubt, no one would comment on you using wangu instead of yangu for a living being. It might be different in Kenya or other swahili speaking countries.
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