ChiShona is Zimbabwe's most widely spoken language, used daily across Harare, Bulawayo and the country's rural provinces, alongside a strong tradition of oral storytelling.

Get ChiShona data →Explore use cases →

10M+

Speakers

Harare, Masvingo

Main regions

Bantu (Shona)

Language family

Mozambique, Zambia

Also spoken in

Real-world applications

Language technology for meaningful impact

Education

Support Shona-medium learning.

Agriculture

Serve rural farming communities.

Healthcare

Improve clinic communication.

Media & content

Radio, TV and digital content.

Government

Civic and public services.

Greetings

Everyday

Professional

Stories

▶

Mhoro

Hello

0:02

▶

Ndatenda

Thank you

0:02

▶

Makadii?

How are you?

0:02

▶

Ndichaonana newe mangwana

I will see you tomorrow

0:03

Hear more examples →

Our speaker community

Diverse voices, authentic data.

Female speaker

Harare, ZW

Male speaker

Bulawayo, ZW

Young speaker

Mutare, ZW

Elder speaker

Masvingo, ZW

Interested in contributing to ChiShona?

Join & Contribute →

🇿🇼

“

I didn't know where I would find ChiShona speech from rural farming communities, but Grho provided a dataset that reflected how people actually talk, not translated text read aloud.

Client name pending · Engineering lead, agri-tech

Placeholder. Replace with a real client or contributor testimonial.

Data for your needs

Need ChiShona (Zimbabwe) data for your project?

From Grho Languages

CASE STUDYCollecting ChiShona speech across regions→RESEARCHChiShona and the dialect-aware ASR problem→INSIGHTSBuilding for ChiShona speakers→

Looking for the wider public data landscape instead? See the full breakdown for ChiShona on the Grho Languages Open Atlas →

🗣

Conversational data

Everyday speech

🎯

Domain-specific data

Agriculture, health, education

🛠

Custom collection

Tailored to your project

Request a dataset →

📖 About ChiShona (Zimbabwe)

Where it is spoken

ChiShona is spoken across most of Zimbabwe, with the largest populations around Harare, Masvingo and Midlands, and speaker communities extending into Mozambique and Zambia.

Language family

ChiShona belongs to the Bantu language family and is often grouped with related dialect clusters including Zezuru, Karanga, Manyika and Ndau.

Writing system

ChiShona is written using the Latin script, with a standardised orthography developed through the twentieth century and used in schools and government publications.

Speakers and regional variation

ChiShona has more than 10 million speakers and is Zimbabwe's most widely spoken language. Regional dialects differ in vocabulary and pronunciation while remaining broadly mutually intelligible.

Digital and technology presence

ChiShona has a strong oral storytelling tradition but limited structured speech data, particularly for agricultural, healthcare and rural-community domains.

💡 Frequently asked questions

Does Grho Languages collect ChiShona speech data?

Yes. We collect conversational and domain-specific ChiShona speech, including agriculture and healthcare contexts relevant to rural communities.

Are ChiShona dialect variants tagged separately?

Where relevant to a project, yes. Regional variation is recorded as metadata rather than standardised away.

Let us build with ChiShona.

Data, a custom dataset, a model or support for your project.

Contact our team →