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Xhosa (/ ˈ k ɔː s ə / KAW-sə or / ˈ k oʊ s ə / KOH-sə, [5] [6] [7] Xhosa: [ᵏǁʰôːsa] ⓘ), 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. [8]
Khoisan (/ ˈ k ɔɪ s ɑː n / KOY-sahn) or Khoe-Sān (pronounced [kxʰoesaːn]) is a catch-all term for the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who traditionally speak non-Bantu languages, combining the Khoekhoen and the Sān peoples.
Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition Oxford Dictionary has 273,000 headwords; 171,476 of them being in current use, 47,156 being obsolete words and around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. The dictionary contains 157,000 combinations and derivatives, and 169,000 phrases and combinations, making a total of over 600,000 word-forms.
indaba – meeting of the community (from Nguni, 'a matter for discussion'); has become a mainstream word in South African English in the sense of consultative conference. inyanga – traditional herbalist and healer (compare with sangoma) jova – injection, to inject (from Zulu) kwedini - a popular word meaning a boy in Xhosa and Zulu
Khoisan was proposed as one of the four families of African languages in Joseph Greenberg's classification (1949–1954, revised in 1963). However, linguists who study Khoisan languages reject their unity, and the name "Khoisan" is used by them as a term of convenience without any implication of linguistic validity, much as "Papuan" and "Australian" are.
The official term is "siSwati" among native speakers; in English, Zulu, Ndebele or Xhosa it may be referred to as Swazi. siSwati is most closely related to the other Tekela languages, like Phuthi and Northern Transvaal (Sumayela) Ndebele, but is also very close to the Zunda languages: Zulu, Southern Ndebele, Northern Ndebele, and Xhosa.
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.
Within a subset of Southern Bantu, the label "Nguni" is used both genetically (in the linguistic sense) and typologically (quite apart from any historical significance).. The Nguni languages are closely related, and in many instances different languages are mutually intelligible; in this way, Nguni languages might better be construed as a dialect continuum than as a cluster of separate languages.
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