Breathy voiceBRETH-ee is a phonation in which the vocal folds vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are adjusted to let more air escape which produces a sighing-like sound. A simple breathy phonation,, can sometimes be heard as an allophone of English between vowels, such as in the word behind, for some speakers.
Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the tut-tut or tsk! tsk! used to express disapproval or pity, the tchick! used to spur on a horse, and the clip-clop! sound children make with their tongue to imitate a horse trotting. However, these paralinguistic sounds in English are not full click consonants, as they only involve the front of the tongue, without the release of the back of the tongue that is required for clicks to combine with vowels and form syllables.
Zulu, or IsiZulu as an endonym, is a Southern Bantu language of the Nguni branch spoken and indigenous to Southern Africa. It is the language of the Zulu people, with about 13.56 million native speakers, who primarily inhabit the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa, and it is understood by over 50% of its population. It became one of South Africa's 12 official languages in 1994.
Xhosa, formerly spelled Xosa and also known by its local name isiXhosa, is a Nguni language, indigenous to Southern Africa and one of the official languages of South Africa and Zimbabwe. Xhosa is spoken as a first language by approximately 8 million people and as a second language in South Africa, particularly in Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Northern Cape and Gauteng, and also in parts of Zimbabwe and Lesotho. It has perhaps the heaviest functional load of click consonants in a Bantu language, with one count finding that 10% of basic vocabulary items contained a click.
isiNdebele, also known as Southern Ndebele is an African language belonging to the Mbo group of Bantu languages, spoken by the Ndebele people of South Africa.
SothoSesotho, also known as Southern Sotho or Sesotho sa Borwa is a Southern Bantu language of the Sotho–Tswana ("S.30") group, spoken in Lesotho, and South Africa where it is an official language.
Swazi or siSwati is a Bantu language of the Nguni group spoken in Eswatini and South Africa by the Swati people. The number of speakers is estimated to be in the region of 4.7 million including first and second language speakers. The language is taught in Eswatini and some South African schools in Mpumalanga, particularly former KaNgwane areas. Siswati is an official language of Eswatini, and is also one of the twelve official languages of South Africa.
At least thirty-five languages are spoken in South Africa, twelve of which are official languages of South Africa: Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, South African Sign Language, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, and English, which is the primary language used in parliamentary and state discourse, though all official languages are equal in legal status. In addition, South African Sign Language was recognised as the twelfth official language of South Africa by the National Assembly on 3 May 2023. Unofficial languages are protected under the Constitution of South Africa, though few are mentioned by any name.
Northern Ndebele, also called Ndebele, isiNdebele saseNyakatho, Zimbabwean Ndebele or North Ndebele, associated with the term Matabele, is a Bantu language spoken by the Northern Ndebele people which belongs to the Nguni group of languages.
Phuthi (Síphùthì) is a Nguni Bantu language spoken in southern Lesotho and areas in South Africa adjacent to the same border. The closest substantial living relative of Phuthi is Swati, spoken in Eswatini and the Mpumalanga province of South Africa. Although there is no contemporary sociocultural or political contact, Phuthi is linguistically part of a historic dialect continuum with Swati. Phuthi is heavily influenced by the surrounding Sesotho and Xhosa languages, but retains a distinct core of lexicon and grammar not found in either Xhosa or Sesotho, and found only partly in Swati to the north.
Mnguni was the leader of the Nguni nation who reached Southern Africa migrating from the North. Additionally, he was the father of King Xhosa. The Xhosa people, today considered a sub-nation of the Nguni nation, were historically referred to as AbeNguni. Mnguni's name derives from the word Nguni, the name for the major ethnicity in South Africa. It now includes the Zulus, Xhosas, Ndebeles and Swazis among others.
South African Bantu-speaking peoples represent the majority indigenous ethno-racial group of South Africans. Occasionally grouped as Bantu, the term itself is derived from the English word "people", common to many of the Bantu languages. The Oxford Dictionary of South African English describes "Bantu", when used in a contemporary usage or racial context as "obsolescent and offensive", because of its strong association with the "white minority rule" with their Apartheid system. However, Bantu is used without pejorative connotations in other parts of Africa and is still used in South Africa as the group term for the language family.
The Nguni people are a linguistic cultural group of Bantu cattle herders who migrated from central Africa into Southern Africa, made up of ethnic groups formed from hunter-gatherer pygmy and proto-agrarians, with offshoots in neighboring colonially-created countries in Southern Africa. Swazi people live in both South Africa and Eswatini, while Ndebele people live in both South Africa and Zimbabwe.
The Hlubi people or AmaHlubi are an AmaMbo ethnic group native to Southern Africa, with the majority of population found in Gauteng, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa.
The Southern Bantu languages are a large group of Bantu languages, largely validated in Janson (1991/92). They are nearly synonymous with Guthrie's Bantu zone S, apart from the debated exclusion of Shona and inclusion of Makhuwa. They include all of the major Bantu languages of South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, and Mozambique, with outliers such as Lozi in Zambia and Namibia, and Ngoni in Zambia, Tanzania and Malawi.
Bhaca, or IsiBhaca (Baca) is a Bantu language of South Africa. Traditionally considered a dialect of Swati, it is closer to Xhosa, Phuthi and Zulu. It is spoken southeast of Lesotho, where Sotho, Xhosa and Zulu meet, mainly around Mount Frere, Mzimkhulu, and to a lesser extent in Mount Ayliff, Matatiele, Harding, Bulwer, Underberg, Highflats, Umzinto, Umzumbe and Ixopo.
Lala is a Bantu language of South Africa, claimed to be extinct in some sources. As of 1999, however, there were still a number of communities of speakers in the coastal regions of the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. Although it is a Tekela Nguni language, for sociological reasons it is often considered a dialect of Zulu, whereas it differs quite markedly in phonology and to a degree in morphology, and with a large portion of its lexicon derived from Xhosa and the IsiZansi Tekela variety of the lower South Coast.
IsiHlubi is a Bantu language of South Africa, traditionally considered a dialect of Swazi. It is spoken in South Africa, near where the Xhosa, Sotho, and Phuthi languages meet at the Orange River and the southern point of Lesotho. The scattered Hlubi people speak several languages, including Swazi, and the Hlubi dialect of Xhosa in the former Bantustan of Ciskei.
Nhlangwini/Ntlangwini (Hlangwane) is a Bantu language of South Africa. It is located along the border between Xhosa and Zulu, but is more closely related to Swazi.
Ditema tsa Dinoko, also known as ditema tsa Sesotho, is a constructed writing system for the siNtu or Southern Bantu languages. It is also known by its IsiZulu name isiBheqe soHlamvu, and by various other names in different languages. It was developed in the 2010s from antecedent ideographic traditions of the Southern African region. Its visual appearance is inspired by these, including the traditional litema arts style. It was developed between 2014 and 2016 by a group of South African linguists and software programmers with the goal of creating a denser writing system to avoid the slowness in reading caused by the word length and visual homogeneity of Southern Bantu languages written in the Roman alphabet. As of 2023, no proposal has been made to encode the script in Unicode, the text encoding standard designed to support all of the world's major writing systems.
