Lala is a Bantu language of
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 ...
, 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 (a
Zunda Nguni language), whereas it differs quite markedly in
phonology
Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...
and to a degree in
morphology, and with a large portion of its
lexicon
A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word () ...
derived from
Xhosa (because of Xhosa-medium schooling in the old Natal South Coast) and the ''IsiZansi''
Tekela variety of the lower South Coast.
References
Languages of South Africa
Nguni languages
Endangered Niger–Congo languages
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