Hehe Language Page

1 CLASSIFICATION AND WHERE SPOKEN

Hehe belongs to the Bena-Kinga group of Bantoid (G62) of Benue-Congo. It is spoken in
Tanzania south of the Great Ruaha River..

2 NUMBER OF SPEAKERS

Voegelin and Voegelin (1977) estimate 190,000 speakers of Hehe, while Grimes (1996)
cites a figure at 750,000 neighboring Hausa (Schuh, personal communication, 1985).

3 DIALECT SURVEY

No dialect survey has come to our attention. 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."

4 USAGE

Hehe is a local language.

5 ORTHOGRAPHIC STATUS

Unknown to us as of this writing.

6 SETS OF LEARNING MATERIALS

Presumably one set of learning materials should be sufficient for Hehe.

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