Temi – A Survivor in Difficult Sea

Abstract

This article treats the Bantu language Temi, sometimes called Gitemi or Sonjo. The Temi language island is 125 kilometres from the nearest Bantu community and completely surrounded by historically hostile Maasai communities. As far as we know, Maasai were preceded by other non-Bantu communities for most of the last millennium. Community and language are both in good shape: in 1928 the population was 2,500, at Tanzanian independence in the 1960s it was 5,000, and now it is over 30,000. It is treated under these headings: geography and population; history; political, sociocultural, and economic context; linguistics; regularity/complexity/stability; contact phenomena; sociolinguistics; language use and attitudes; networks.