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The Nguni languages are a group of Bantu languages spoken in southern Africa (mainly South Africa, Zimbabwe and Eswatini) by the Nguni people. Nguni languages include Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele, and Swati. The appellation "Nguni" derives from the Nguni cattle type. Ngoni (see below) is an older, or a shifted, variant.
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]
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 Bantu language, indigenous to Southern Africa and one of the official languages of South Africa and Zimbabwe. [8]
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. [4]
Note that the figure mentioned on this page is based upon the number of people speaking Xhosa as their home language, which may be greater or less than the total number of people claiming Xhosa descent. In addition, several million people in the Johannesburg-Soweto region speak Xhosa or Zulu as a second or third language. For a majority of ...
Other major Bantu languages include Lingala with more than 20 million speakers (Congo, DRC), followed by Zulu with 13.56 million speakers (South Africa), Xhosa at a distant third place with 8.2 million speakers (South Africa and Zimbabwe), and Shona with less than 10 million speakers (if Manyika and Ndau are included), while Sotho-Tswana ...
Although it was the third African-language Wikipedia to reach 100 articles, [2] progress has been slow, and it has been surpassed by numerous other African languages. As Zulu is mostly mutually intelligible with Xhosa, both of which are Nguni languages, it is possible for articles in the Zulu edition to be easily translated into Xhosa for the Xhosa Wikipedia.
The Xhosa often called the "Red Blanket People," are Bantu people living in south-east South Africa and in the last two centuries throughout the southern and central-southern parts of the country. Both the Ndebele of Zimbabwe and the Ngoni migrated northward out of South Africa in the early 19th century, during a politically tumultuous era that ...