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English missionary Henry Hare Dugmore helped translate the Bible into Xhosa in 1859 Nelson Mandela was a Xhosa and was a member of the royal family of the Thembu tribe. Xhosa-speaking people have inhabited coastal regions of southeastern Africa since before the 16th century. They refer to themselves as the amaXhosa and their language as isiXhosa.
Ditema tsa Dinoko (Sesotho for "Ditema syllabary"), also known as ditema tsa Sesotho, is a constructed writing system (specifically, a featural syllabary) for the siNtu or Southern Bantu languages (such as Sesotho, Setswana, IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, SiSwati, SiPhuthi, Xitsonga, EMakhuwa, ChiNgoni, SiLozi, ChiShona and Tshivenḓa).
While the Xhosas call their language "isiXhosa", it is usually referred to as "Xhosa" in English. Written Xhosa uses a Latin alphabet –based system. Xhosa is spoken by about 18% of the South African population, and has some mutual intelligibility with Zulu, especially Zulu spoken in urban areas.
The most common language spoken as a first language by South Africans is Zulu (23%), followed by Xhosa (16%), and Afrikaans (14%). English is the fourth most common first language in the country (9.6%), but is understood in most urban areas and is the dominant language in government and the media.
South Africa's official language policy refers to the eleven official languages of South Africa (i.e., Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afrikaans, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu and English), as specified in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.
Amandla is a IsiXhosa and IsiZulu word used when people make a bet, deal or promise; they say the word and hold up their hands with their thumbs up.. Since apartheid ended, people have begun to use the rallying cry "Amandla" to express their grievances against current government policies including those of the ANC.
Zulu (/ ˈ z uː l uː / ZOO-loo), or isiZulu as an endonym, is a Southern Bantu language of the Nguni branch spoken in, and indigenous to, Southern Africa.It is the language of the Zulu people, with about 13.56 million native speakers, who primarily inhabit the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. [3]
The Nguni people are an ethnolinguistic grouping of Bantu nomads who migrated from central Africa into Southern Africa, made up of ethnic groups formed during the late Iron Age, with offshoots in neighboring colonially-created countries in Southern Africa. [1]