On this page/Sur cette page... (hide)
Hehe (Kihehe) belongs to the Bena-Kinga group of Bantoid (G62) of Benue-Congo. (Webbook)
Ethnologue lists the Niger-Congo, Atlantic-Congo, Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern, Narrow Bantu, Central, G, Bena-Kinga (G.60)
It is spoken in Tanzania south of the Great Ruaha River. (Webbook)
750,000 (1994 UBS) (Ethnologue)
No dialect survey has come to our attention. Derek Nurse discusses Hehe in "Description of Sample Languages of Tanzania" (1979) and suggests that Hehe may be mutually intelligible with Bena. To this point, Mary Odden (personal communication, 1985) states that "both my Kihehe informant, Margaret Fivawo, and Enoch Waketi, my Hibena speaker, agreed that although Hibena spoken along the border of the two areas is mutually intelligible with Kihehe, other Bena dialects were not." (Webbook)
According to Ethnologue: Lexical similarity 65% with Bena (closest), 59% with Pangwa, 56% with Sangu, 50% with Kinga, 48% with Wanji.
Hehe is a local language. (Webbook)
Not known, though this would be a Latin-based orthography.
None known of.
Dwyer, David (1997), Webbook of African Languages, http://www.isp.msu.edu/AfrLang/hiermenu.html (page on "Hehe," http://www.isp.msu.edu/AfrLang/Hehe_root.html )
SIL International, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, "Hehe," http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=heh
SIL International, "ISO 639 Code Tables," http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp
U.S. Library of Congress, "ISO 639.2: Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages: Alpha-3 codes arranged alphabetically by the English name of language," http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php
< Hausa | Major Languages | Idoma >
