“Last night I saw something that I have never seen before. A young woman took a smooth stone out of her bag. She touched it and it started glowing in the dark. She pointed at it and the face of her mother appeared on the surface of the stone. She touched the face with her finger, and her mother started talking to her. If that is not witchcraft, then I don’t know what is.”

In the past, such a woman would have been burnt at the stake as a witch. Today, she is an innocent girl making a phone call on her smart phone. Times have changed.

There are no Bemba words for Blog or LOL. Every language grows as new demands are encountered and new words are invented to meet that need. The more popular words that eventually become accepted by everybody later become part of normal language. There is no single person whose job it is to decide which words will become accepted. It is something that everybody is involved in and it is a slow process. The Bemba language spoken in urban centres along the line of rail is already a mash up of many languages, including English.

English is a mash up of languages that include Latin and Greek. The measure of how popular a new word word is will usually be when it is included by a group of scholars in the Oxford English and Cambridge Dictionaries. New words they included in 2014 include book launch, DIYer and honk. There is no Bemba equivalent of these bodies of scholars.

This post is an effort to stimulate interest in new Bemba words that we need or are already using to describe new situations or things. Feel free to suggest the words that our Bemba scholars should consider when updating the language.

Here are some that you may already be using. Can you think of a better way to say it? Feel free to write your thoughts here.

ON THE ROAD: