Bemba (also known as Zambian or natively known as Chibemba, Ichibemba and Chiwemba), is a Bantu language spoken primarily in north-eastern Zambia by the Bemba people.

Bemba is spoken in rural and urban areas of the region, and is one of Zambia's seven recognized regional languages.

Bemba has several dialects, which include Chishinga, Lomotwa, Ngoma, Nwesi, Lala, Luunda, Mukulu, and Ng’umbo. The Twa of Bangweulu speak another dialect of Bemba.

The orthographical system in common use, originally introduced by Edward Steere, is quite phonetic. Its letters, with their approximate phonetic values, are given below.

It has become increasingly common to use 'c' in place of 'ch'. In common with other Bantu languages, as affixes are added, combinations of vowels may contract and consonants may change. For example, 'aa' changes to a long 'a', 'ae' and 'ai' change to 'e', and 'ao' and 'au' change to 'o' (in other cases, a 'y' is often used to separate other combinations of vowels). The nasal 'n' changes to 'm' before 'b' or 'p', and is pronounced ŋ before 'k' or 'g'; after 'n', 'l' changes to 'd'. These rules will all be implicit in the tables given below.

Like many Bantu languages, Bemba is tonal, with two tones. However, tone has limited effect on meaning as the number of words that would otherwise be confused is small. Stress tends to fall on the prefix, when it exists, and can lead to subtle differences of meaning (see the verb forms below).

Detailed analyses of the tonology and phonology of Bemba can be found in work like: Bickmore & Kula (2013), Kula & Bickmore (2015), Hamann & Kula (2015) and Kula & Hamann (2017).

Many of the main features of Bemba grammar are fairly typical of Bantu languages: it is agglutinative, depends mainly on prefixes, has a system of several noun classes, a large set of verbal aspects and tenses, very few actual adjectives, and, like English, has a word order that is subject-verb-object. Most of the classification here is taken from that given by Schoeffer, Sheane and Cornwallis.