Venḓa or Tshivenḓa is a Bantu language and an official language of South Africa and

Zimbabwe file:Zimbabwe, relief map.jpg, upright=1.22, Zimbabwe, relief map Zimbabwe, officially the Republic of Zimbabwe, is a landlocked country in Southeast Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers, bordered by South Africa to the south, Bots ...

. It is mainly spoken by the

Venda people The Venḓa (VhaVenḓa or Vhangona) are a Bantu people native to Southern Africa living mostly near the South African-Zimbabwean border. The Venda language arose from interactions with Sotho-Tswana and Kalanga groups from 1400. The Venda ...

(or Vhavenḓa) in the northern part of South Africa's

Limpopo province Limpopo () is the northernmost province of South Africa. It is named after the Limpopo River, which forms the province's western and northern borders. The term Limpopo is derived from Rivombo (Livombo/Lebombo), a group of Tsonga settlers ...

, as well as by some Lemba people in

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...

. The Tshivenda language is related to Shona (Karanga and Kalanga) which is spoken in

Southern Africa Southern Africa is the southernmost region of Africa. No definition is agreed upon, but some groupings include the United Nations geoscheme for Africa, United Nations geoscheme, the intergovernmental Southern African Development Community, and ...

. During the

apartheid Apartheid ( , especially South African English: , ; , ) was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. It was characterised by an ...

era of South Africa, the

Bantustan A Bantustan (also known as a Bantu peoples, Bantu homeland, a Black people, black homeland, a Khoisan, black state or simply known as a homeland; ) was a territory that the National Party (South Africa), National Party administration of the ...

Venda Venda ( ), officially the Republic of Venda (; ), was a Bantustan in northern South Africa. It was fairly close to the South African border with Zimbabwe to the north, while, to the south and east, it shared a long border with another black hom ...

was set up to cover the Venda speakers of

. According to the 2011

census A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...

, Venda speakers are concentrated in the following areas:

Makhado Local Municipality Makhado Municipality (; ) is a local municipality within the Vhembe District Municipality, in the Limpopo province of South Africa. The seat is Louis Trichardt. It is named in honour of 19th-century King (Thovhele) in the Singo (or Vhasenzi) dyna ...

, with 350,000 people;

Thulamela Local Municipality Thulamela Municipality (; ) is a local municipality within the Vhembe District Municipality, in the Limpopo province of South Africa. Its municipal boundaries were greatly altered after the 2016 municipal elections when much of the area that for ...

, with 370,000 people;

Musina Local Municipality Musina Municipality () is a local municipality within the Vhembe District Municipality, in the Limpopo province of South Africa. It is the northernmost local municipality in South Africa. It borders Botswana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The seat is ...

, with 35,000 people; and

Mutale Local Municipality Mutale Local Municipality was a municipality located in the Vhembe District Municipality of Limpopo province, South Africa. The seat of Mutale Local Municipality was Mutale. It is now part of Thulamela and Musina Local Municipalities. Main places ...

, with 89,000 people. The total number of speakers in Vhembe district currently stands at 844,000. In

Gauteng province Gauteng ( , ; Sotho-Tswana for 'place of gold'; or ) is one of the nine provinces of South Africa. Situated on the Highveld, Gauteng is the smallest province by land area in South Africa. Although Gauteng accounts for only 1.5% of the coun ...

, there are 275,000 Venda speakers. Fewer than 10,000 are spread across the rest of the country—for a total number of Venda speakers in South Africa at 1.2 million people or just 2.2% of South Africa's population, making Venda speakers the second smallest minority language in South Africa, after the Ndebele language, which number 1.1 million speakers. The population statistics of the Venda people in

are not clear but may currently stand at a million. The people are concentrated in the South of the country but also spread to other towns and cities. There is also a significant number of them in neighbouring South Africa where they are

migrant workers A migrant worker is a person who Human migration, migrates within a home country or outside it to pursue work. Migrant workers usually do not have an intention to stay permanently in the country or region in which they work. Migrant workers ...

Writing system

The Venda language uses the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

with five additional accented letters. There are four

dental consonant A dental consonant is a consonant articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as , . In some languages, dentals are distinguished from other groups, such as alveolar consonants, in which the tongue contacts the gum ridge. Denta ...

s with a

circumflex accent The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...

below the letter (''ḓ, ḽ, ṋ, ṱ'') and an

overdot When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot refers to the glyphs "combining dot above" (, and "combining dot below" ( which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in a variety of languages. Similar marks are ...

for

velar Velar may refer to: * Velar consonant Velar consonants are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (also known as the "velum"). Since the velar region ...

''ṅ''. Five vowel letters are used to write seven vowels. The letters C, J and Q are used only for foreign words and names.

Unicode

The extra letters have the following

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

names: * Ḓ U+1E12 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * ḓ U+1E13 LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * Ḽ U+1E3C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * ḽ U+1E3D LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * Ṅ U+1E44 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH DOT ABOVE * ṅ U+1E45 LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH DOT ABOVE * Ṋ U+1E4A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * ṋ U+1E4B LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * Ṱ U+1E70 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * ṱ U+1E71 LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW

Luṱhofunḓeraru lwa Mibvumo

The ''sintu'' writing system ''Isibheqe Sohlamvu/

Ditema tsa Dinoko Ditema tsa Dinoko (), also known as isiBheqe soHlamvu (), and sometimes known as Xiyinhlanharhu xa Mipfawulo or Xifungho xa Manungu in Tsonga language, xiTsonga and Luṱhofunḓeraru lwa Mibvumo or Vhuga ha Madungo in Venda language, tshiVen� ...

'', known technically in Venda as ''Luṱhofunḓeraru lwa Mibvumo'', is also used for the Venda language.

Phonology

Venda distinguishes dental ''ṱ, ṱh, ḓ, ṋ, ḽ'' from

alveolar Alveolus (; pl. alveoli, adj. alveolar) is a general anatomical term for a concave cavity or pit. Uses in anatomy and zoology * Pulmonary alveolus, an air sac in the lungs ** Alveolar cell or pneumocyte ** Alveolar duct ** Alveolar macrophage * M ...

''t, th, d, n, l'' as well as (like in Ewe)

labiodental In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth, such as and . In English, labiodentalized /s/, /z/ and /r/ are characteristic of some individuals; these may be written . Labiodental consonants in ...

''f, v'' from

bilabial In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips. Frequency Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tling ...

''fh, vh'' (the last two are slightly rounded). There are no clicks. As in other South African languages like Zulu, ''ph, ṱh, th, kh'' are aspirated and the "plain" stops ''p, ṱ, t,'' and ''k'' are

ejective In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some l ...

Vowels

There are five vowel sounds in Tshivenḓa.

Consonants

A labiodental nasal sound appears in prenasalised consonant sounds. is mostly heard as an allophone of in free variation and in loanwords. Labiovelar sounds occur as alternatives to labiopalatal sounds and may also be pronounced .

Fortition In articulatory phonetics, fortition, also known as strengthening, is a consonantal change that increases the degree of stricture. It is the opposite of the more common lenition. For example, a fricative or an approximant may become a stop (i ...

of occurs after nasal prefixes, likely to .Netshisaulu N.C & Nyoni A. 2021. Tshivenḓa Tsho Vhibvaho. World wide Publishers

Tones

Venda has a specified tone, , with unmarked syllables having a low tone.

Phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

falling tone occurs only in sequences of more than one vowel or on the penultimate syllable if the vowel is long. Tone patterns exist independently of the

consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

and vowels of a word and so they are

word tone Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis ...

s. Venda tone also follows

Meeussen's rule Meeussen's rule is a special case of tone reduction. It was first described in Bantu languages, but occurs in analyses of other languages as well, such as Papuan languages. The tonal alternation that it describes is the lowering, in some contexts, ...

: when a word beginning with a high tone is preceded by that high tone, the initial high tone is lost. (That is, there cannot be two adjacent marked high tones in a word, but high tone spreads allophonically to a following non-tonic ("low"-tone) syllable.) There are only a few tone patterns in Venda words (no tone, a single high tone on some syllable, two non-adjacent high tones), which behave as follows:

References

Sources

External links

Tshivenḓa Grammar Guide
by Zach Gershkoff, US

Peace Corps The Peace Corps is an Independent agency of the U.S. government, independent agency and program of the United States government that trains and deploys volunteers to communities in partner countries around the world. It was established in Marc ...

(2012).
PanAfrican L10n page on VendaYoung kasahorow Dictionary in Venda

Software

Translate.org.za
Project to translate Free and Open Source Software into all the official languages of South Africa, including Venda {{DEFAULTSORT:Venda language Southern Bantu languages Languages of South Africa Languages of Zimbabwe