Shubi language

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Shubi
Spoken in:	Kagera Region in Tanzania
Total speakers:	150,000
Language family:	Niger-Congo Atlantic-Congo Volta-Congo Benue-Congo Bantoid Southern Narrow Bantu Central J Shubi
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`–`
ISO 639-3:	`suj`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Shubi is a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania. It is may use the labiodental plosive as a phoneme, rather than as an allophone of the bilabial plosive. Peter Ladefoged wrote:

We have heard labiodental stops made by a Shubi speaker whose teeth were sufficiently close together to allow him to make an airtight labiodental closure. For this speaker this sound was clearly in contrast with a bilabial stop; but we suspect that the majority of Shubi speakers make the contrast one of bilabial stop versus labial-labiodental affricate (i.e. bilabial stop closure followed by a labiodental fricative), rather than bilabial versus labiodental stop.^[1]