Chichewa linguistic data

Word order, tone system, gender/noun-class count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Chichewa's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.

Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.

Two names for essentially the same language. Chichewa is the standard name in Malawi, where it's an official language alongside English. Chinyanja is used in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. The two names refer to mutually intelligible varieties — Chichewa is often considered the prestige standard, with Chinyanja being a slightly more conservative or regional form.

Chichewa has two phonemic tones (high, low) plus tonal phenomena like high-tone shifting and downstep. Tone has been heavily studied in Chichewa — it's one of the major reference languages for Bantu tonology. Tone marks lexical contrasts (mtengo 'tree' versus mtengo 'price' with different tone patterns) and grammatical contrasts on verbs.

All three are Bantu (Niger-Congo) languages of central/southern Africa, sharing SVO order, noun-class systems, agglutinative morphology, and tonal patterns. They sit in adjacent regions of the Bantu language continuum and share Proto-Bantu cognate vocabulary. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.