ABSTRACT
One measure of the distinctness of Zambian languages is their mutual intelligibility. In practice at the present time this issue arises mainly when Zambians originating from different areas of the country meet in towns along the line of rail. Since adults who have lived and worked in these urban centres for some time generally claim a high degree of multilingualism, one might expect that school children brought up in Lusaka would tend to show a high level of competence in Ci-Nyanja, the city's main lingua franca. In the case of native speakers of Nyanja, the hypothesis was that the higher socio-economic group would tend to perform better on the test than the lower socio-economic group. For the Lozi speaker or Tonga speaker, the situation is probably also essentially trilingual, Bemba and Nyanja becoming fused into an undifferentiated urban dialect which is restricted to "public" L functions.
