- Official language in
- South Africa
- Script
- Latin
- Speakers
- 2.3M (2011)
Where it's spoken
Xitsonga is one of the official languages of South Africa.
According to the national census, about 4.5 percent of the South African population speaks it as a first language. It is generally associated with the provinces of Limpopo and Mpumalanga: in Limpopo, just over half of the people speak Sepedi, followed by Xitsonga and Tshivenda. The census also counted more first-language speakers of Xitsonga in Gauteng than in Mpumalanga. One researcher cites an earlier estimate that counts speakers in South Africa, Mozambique, Eswatini and Zimbabwe together.
Sources
- South African Government, "South Africa's people" (official languages)
- Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (as amended, 2012 revision) — Section 6(1)
- Statistics South Africa (2012). "Census 2011 Census in Brief." Report No. 03-01-41 — Table 2.5 (printed p.23) and the text on printed p.25
- Mitchley, Hazel (2015). "Agreement and Coordination in Xitsonga, Sesotho and isiXhosa: An Optimality Theoretic Perspective." MA thesis, Rhodes University — Section 4.1 (printed pp.61-62) and Table (1), "The Subject Markers in Xitsonga"
Script & pronunciation
Xitsonga uses the Latin alphabet, and certain sounds are spelled with a combination of letters. The letter x stands for the sound "sh", the voiceless postalveolar fricative, as in English "shoe". A study of Xitsonga spelling notes that sh and x sound the same but are spelled differently: sh appears in some surnames, while x is the one used in ordinary writing. This app's card for the greeting Xewani ("Hello / Greetings") begins with this letter, and its note says that x is "sh", not a click.
An early-reading study describes Xitsonga orthography as somewhere in between conjunctive writing, where the parts of a verb are joined into one word, and disjunctive writing, where they are written as separate words. In this app's cards the subject marker is written as a separate word before the verb: in Ndzi vulavula Xitsonga katsongo ("I speak a little Xitsonga"), the card notes that ndzi is a separate word before the verb.
Sources
- ILC, "Xitsonga in 2016"
- Xitsonga.org, "The evolution of the Xitsonga X"
- Maluleke, Rivalani (2013). "The impact of phonetics and phonology on the Xitsonga orthography." MA mini-dissertation, University of Limpopo — Chapter 1, printed p.3
- Spaull, Nic; Pretorius, Elizabeth; Mohohlwane, Nompumelelo (2018). "Investigating the Comprehension Iceberg: Developing empirical benchmarks for early grade reading in agglutinating African languages." RESEP Working Paper WP01/2018
Grammar essentials
Xitsonga is described as having 16 noun classes, numbered 1 to 11 and 14 to 18. The subject marker on a verb agrees with the class of the subject; class 1 has the subject marker u and class 2, the plural counterpart of class 1 in the source's table, has va.
This app's cards show the class prefix carried onto a numeral: in Vanhu vambirhi ("Two people"), the card notes that the plural of munhu is vanhu and that the numeral mbirhi takes the class prefix and becomes vambirhi.
Sources
- Mitchley, Hazel (2015). "Agreement and Coordination in Xitsonga, Sesotho and isiXhosa: An Optimality Theoretic Perspective." MA thesis, Rhodes University — Section 4.1 (printed pp.61-62) and Table (1), "The Subject Markers in Xitsonga"