Lomwe is spoken in the central belt of Mozambique north of the Zambezi, from the coast between Port Amelia and Angoche, westward to Lake Chilwa and Mlanje mountains, and into Malawi.
The 1950 census for Mozambique reported 2.293 million Makua/Lomwe speakers. Price (personal communication, 1985) notes that the Anuario Católico de Moçambique reports a total of 3,334,721 Makua speakers, although this probably includes one million Lomwe speakers. This figure, when added to the number of Makua in Tanzania and Lomwe in Malawi, supports the 3 million Makua and 2 million Lomwe speakers suggested by UBS (1982). Grimes (1996) gives a figure of 2,850,000 Lomwe speakers.
Makua and Lomwe are used largely as local languages.
No standardized orthography currently exists for Makua/Lomwe, although differences between the dialects do not appear to present serious difficulties.
One set of learning materials should be sufficient, although following a recommendation from Price (personal communication), it may be necessary to produce separate materials at more advanced levels because of vocabulary and syntactic differences in Makua and Lomwe.
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