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Sotho Language
Sotho (), also known as ''Sesotho'' (), Southern Sotho, or ''Sesotho sa Borwa'' is a Southern Bantu languages, Southern Bantu language spoken in Lesotho as its national language and South Africa where it is an official language. Like all Bantu languages, Sesotho is an agglutinative language that uses numerous affixes and derivational and inflexional rules to build Sesotho grammar#The Sesotho word, complete words. Classification Sotho is a Southern Bantu languages, Southern Bantu language belonging to the Niger–Congo languages, Niger–Congo language family within the Sotho-Tswana languages, Sotho-Tswana branch of Guthrie classification of Bantu languages#Zone S, Zone S (S.30). "Sotho" is also the name given to the entire Sotho-Tswana group, in which case Sesotho proper is called "Southern Sotho". Within the Sotho-Tswana group Southern Sotho is also related to Lozi language, Lozi (''Silozi'') with which it forms the Sesotho-Lozi group within Sotho-Tswana. The Northern Sot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Lesotho
Lesotho, formally the Kingdom of Lesotho and formerly known as Basutoland, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Entirely surrounded by South Africa, it is the largest of only three sovereign enclave and exclave, enclaves in the world, the others being San Marino and Vatican City, which are surrounded by Italy. Lesotho is situated in the Maloti Mountains and contains the Thabana Ntlenyana, highest peak in Southern Africa. It has an area of over and has a population of about 2.311 million. Its Capital city, capital and largest city is Maseru. Lesotho was formed in 1824 by Moshoeshoe I, King Moshoeshoe I. Continuous encroachments by Dutch settlers made the King enter into an agreement with the United Kingdom to become a protectorate in 1868 and, in 1884, a crown colony. History of Lesotho, It achieved independence in 1966, and was subsequently ruled by the Basotho National Party (BNP) for two decades. Its constitutional government was restored in 1993 after seven years o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Pan South African Language Board
The Pan South African Language Board (, abbreviated PanSALB) is an organisation in South Africa established to promote multilingualism, to develop and preserve th12 official languages and to protect language rights in South Africa. The Board was established in terms of Act 59 of 1995 by the Parliament of South Africa. In addition to the 12 official languages of South Africa, PanSALB also strives to create conditions for the use and development of all languages used by communities in the country including the Khoe, San, and Nama. PanSALB structures include: the Provincial Language Committees (PLCs), the National Language Bodies (NLBs), and the National Lexicography Units (NLUs SWiP Collaboration In 2023, a collaborative project began between PanSALB, SADiLaR (the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources), and Wikimedia ZA to advance the use of vernacular language on Wikipedia as well as the presence of indigenous South African languages in cyberspace. The project ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Tswana Language
Tswana, also known by its Endonym and exonym, native name Setswana, is a Bantu language indigenous to Southern Africa and spoken by about 8.2 million people. It is closely related to the Northern Sotho language, Northern Sotho and Sotho language, Southern Sotho languages, as well as the Kgalagadi language and the Lozi language. Setswana is an official language of South Africa and Zimbabwe. It is a lingua franca in Botswana and parts of South Africa, particularly North West Province. Tswana speaking ethnic groups are found in more than two provinces of South Africa, primarily in the North West (South African province), North West, where about four million people speak the language. An urbanised variety is known as Pretoria Sotho, and is the principal unique language of the city of Pretoria. The three South African provinces with the most speakers are Gauteng (circa 11%), Northern Cape, and North West (over 70%). Until 1994, South African Tswana people were notionally citizens ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Northern Sotho
Sepedi, also known as Northern Sotho, is one of South Africa’s twelve official languages and belongs to the Bantu language family, specifically the Sotho-Tswana group. The language is spoken mainly in Limpopo Province, and to a lesser extent in Gauteng, Mpumalanga, and North West''.'' Sepedi refers to the ''dialect'' spoken by the Pedi people. Northern Sotho is the umbrella term for a group of related dialects. The two terms are often used interchangeably, but technically Sepedi is one dialect of Northern Sotho. As of the 2022 South African Census, approximately 6.2 million people — or 10.0% of the national population speak Sepedi as their first language. Sepedi ranks as the fifth most spoken first language. Official language status Sepedi vs Northern Sotho According to Chapter 1, Section 6 of the South African Constitution, Sepedi is one of South Africa's 12 official languages. There has been significant debate about whether Northern Sotho should be used instead of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Lozi Language
Lozi, also known as Silozi and Rozi, is a Bantu language of the Niger–Congo language family within the Sotho–Tswana branch of Zone S (S.30), that is spoken by the Lozi people, primarily in southwestern Zambia and in Namibia. The language is most closely related to Northern Sotho (''Sesotho sa Leboa''), Tswana (''Setswana''), Kgalagari (''SheKgalagari'') and Sotho (''Sesotho''/Southern Sotho). Lozi is sometimes written as ''Rotse''. ''Silozi'' is the endonym (the name of the language used by its native speakers). The origins of Silozi can be traced back to a mixture of languages, primarily Luyana and Kololo. The Luyana people migrated south from the Kingdom of Luba and Kingdom of Lunda in the Katanga area of the Congo River basin, either late in the 17th century or early in the 18th century. They settled on the floodplains of the upper Zambezi River in what is now western Zambia, where they established a kingdom called Barotseland or Bulozi. In the 1830s, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Guthrie Classification Of Bantu Languages
The 250 or so "Narrow Bantu languages" are conventionally divided up into geographic zones first proposed by Malcolm Guthrie (1967–1971). These were assigned letters A–S and divided into decades (groups A10, A20, etc.); individual languages were assigned unit numbers (A11, A12, etc.), and dialects further subdivided (A11a, A11b, etc.). This coding system has become the standard for identifying Bantu languages; it was a practical way to distinguish many ambiguously named languages before the introduction of ISO 639-3 coding, and it continues to be widely used. Only Guthrie's Zone S is (sometimes) considered to be a genealogical group. Since Guthrie's time a Zone J (made of languages formerly classified in groups D and E) has been set up as another possible genealogical group bordering the Great Lakes. The list is first summarized, with links to articles on accepted groups of Bantu languages (bold decade headings). Following that is the complete 1948 list, as updated by Guthr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Sotho-Tswana Languages
The Sotho-Tswana, also known as the Sotho or Basotho, although the term is now closely associated with the Southern Sotho peoples are a meta-ethnicity of Southern Africa. They are a large and diverse group of people who speak Sotho-Tswana languages. The group is predominantly found in Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, and the western part of Zambia. Smaller groups can also be found in Namibia and Zimbabwe. The Sotho-Tswana people would have diversified into their current arrangement during the course of the 2nd millennium, but they retain a number of linguistic and cultural characteristics that distinguish them from other Bantu-speakers of southern Africa. These are features such as totemism/ diboko a pre-emptive right of men to marry their maternal cousins, and an architectural style characterized by a round hut with a conical thatch roof supported by wooden pillars on the outside. Other major distinguishing features included their dress of skin cloaks and a preference ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Niger–Congo Languages
Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over the majority of sub-Saharan Africa. It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic–Congo languages (which share a characteristic noun class system), and possibly several smaller groups of languages that are difficult to classify. If valid, Niger–Congo would be the world's largest in terms of member languages, the third-largest in terms of speakers, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area.Irene Thompson"Niger-Congo Language Family" "aboutworldlanguages", March 2015 Austronesian has almost as many member languages, although this is complicated by the ambiguity about what constitutes a distinct language; the number of named Niger–Congo languages listed by '' Ethnologue'' is 1,540. The proposed family would be the third-largest in the world by number of native speakers, with around 600 million people as of 2025. Within Niger–Congo, the Bantu languages alone account for 350 million people (2015), or half ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Sesotho Grammar
This article presents a brief overview of the grammar of the Sesotho and provides links to more detailed articles. Typology The Sesotho language may be described in several ways depending on the aspect being considered. *It is an agglutinative language. It constructs whole words by joining discrete roots and morphemes with specific meanings, and may also modify words by similar processes. *Its basic word order is SVO. However, because the verb is marked with the subject and sometimes the object, this order may be changed to emphasise certain parts of the predicate. *It is a tonal language; more specifically, a complex grammatical tone language. See Sotho tonology. *It has no grammatical case marking on the noun. Nominal roles are indicated by a combination of word order and agreement markers on the verb, with no change to the nouns themselves. *It has a complex grammatical gender system, but this does not include natural gender. See Sotho nouns. *It has head-first order, thou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Affixes
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as ''un-'', ''-ation'', ''anti-'', ''pre-'' etc., introduce a semantic change to the word they are attached to. Inflectional affixes introduce a syntactic change, such as singular into plural (e.g. ''-(e)s''), or present simple tense into present continuous or past tense by adding ''-ing'', ''-ed'' to an English word. All of them are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes. Affixes, infixes and their variations Changing a word by adding a morpheme at its beginning is called ''prefixation'', in the middle is called ''infixation'', and at the end is called ''suffixation''. ''Prefix'' and ''suffix'' may be subsumed under the term ''adfix'', in contrast to ''infix.'' When marking text for interlinear glossing, as shown in the third column in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Agglutinative Language
An agglutinative language is a type of language that primarily forms words by stringing together morphemes (word parts)—each typically representing a single grammatical meaning—without significant modification to their forms ( agglutinations). In such languages, affixes ( prefixes, suffixes, infixes, or circumfixes) are added to a root word in a linear and systematic way, creating complex words that encode detailed grammatical information. This structure allows for a high degree of transparency, as the boundaries between morphemes are usually clear and their meanings consistent. Agglutinative languages are a subset of synthetic languages. Within this category, they are distinguished from fusional languages, where morphemes often blend or change form to express multiple grammatical functions, and from polysynthetic languages, which can combine numerous morphemes into single words with complex meanings. Examples of agglutinative languages include Turkish, Finnish, Japane ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Official Language
An official language is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as, "the language or one of the languages that is accepted by a country's government, is taught in schools, used in the courts of law, etc." Depending on the decree, establishment of an official language might also place restrictions on the use of other languages. Designated rights of an official language can be created in written form or by historic usage. An official language is recognized by 178 countries, of which 101 recognize more than one. The government of Italy made Italian language, Italian their official language in 1999, and some nations (such as Mexico and Australia) have never declared ''de jure'' official languages at the national level. Other nations have declared non-indigenous official languages. Many of the world's constitutions mention one or more official or national languages. Some countries use the official language designation to empower indigenous groups by giving them access to the gover ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |