Kidaw'ida
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://kencorpus.ke/handle/00254/48
Kidaw'ida — also written Daw'ida, and known in Kiswahili as Kitaita — is a Northeast Bantu language spoken by the Wadawida, the largest subgroup of the Taita people of Taita-Taveta County in south-eastern Kenya. It is the principal language of the Dawida massif, the most densely populated and agriculturally productive section of the Taita Hills, and is the variety most commonly intended when the terms "Kitaita" or "Taita language" are used in educational, media, and policy contexts. ISO 639-3: dav. Glottolog: dawi1234 (under the Taita family node tait1250). The speaker population is estimated at approximately 300,000 to 400,000, concentrated in Taita-Taveta County and in the Kenyan diaspora in Mombasa, Nairobi, and beyond. The language faces pressure from Kiswahili and English dominance in education, employment, and media, and active corpus-building and NLP development initiatives, including the Mbogho et al. (2025) parallel corpus project, are supporting its digital presence. This archive receives and complements those efforts by providing a persistent, community-accessible repository for Kidaw'ida language materials.