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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]
Xhosa and Yeyi are Bantu languages, from the two geographic areas of that family that have acquired clicks. (Zulu is similar to Xhosa apart from not having /ᵑꞰˀ/) Damin was an initiation jargon in northern Australia. Each language below is illustrated with Ʞ as a placeholder for the different click types.
Xhosa is an agglutinative tonal language categorized under Bantu linguistic classification. While the Xhosas call their language "isiXhosa", it is usually referred to as "Xhosa" in English. Written Xhosa uses a Latin alphabet–based system.
The clicks of Xhosa, in the Lepsius alphabet of 1854. The ṅ is equivalent to ŋ . The pipe with the acute accent was soon replaced with ǂ . The click letters created by Carl Jakob Sundevall in 1855 (right column), along with the corresponding Lepsius letters (center).
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.
Nine other languages have been written in braille: Afrikaans, Ndebele, Sesotho, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu. [1] All print alphabets are restricted to the basic Latin alphabet, with diacritics in some cases; the braille alphabets are likewise basic braille with additional letters to render the diacritics.
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The charts below show the way in which the IPA is used to transcribe the Nguni languages Swazi, Xhosa, and Zulu.For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters.