Ndau lacks an approved orthography, its status as a constitutional official language in Zimbabwe notwithstanding. Owing to this, Ndau speaker-writers have been transferring their learnt Shona spelling skills to represent their language in writing. This, as expected, has contributed to several spelling mistakes in representing difficult Ndau words such as those involving lateral and click sounds. To mitigate such challenges, Mozambican scholars Ngunga and Sitoe (2000) and Ngunga and Faquir (2011), have made two separate proposals to reform Ndau orthography and prescribe standard pronunciation and grammatical structures while also purging spelling and word division inconsistencies. However, the major weakness of such reforms was that they were restricted only to update Mozambican Ndau thereby overlooking salient linguistic characteristics such as aspiration, clicks and laterality which regrettably are predominant and preeminent in Zimbabwean Ndau. Also, some, especially VaDanda people, employ the characteristics ignored by orthography designers in Mozambique.
The third proposal was by Sithole (2016) titled A Unified Spelling Guide for Ndau which has appeared quite popular with Ndau speaker-writers in Zimbabwe. Sithole’s orthographic reform was described as “unified” because data was collected from all Ndau speaking dialects in both countries. However, despite the data that was collected from all Ndau speaking regions, the actual process of designing the orthography did not involve participants from Mozambique which culminated in the Zimbabwean Ndau partially dominating Mozambican Ndau in terms of representation. More consultations need to be done to improve the reforms.