Zulu language

From Freepedia

Zulu (isiZulu)
Spoken in:	South Africa, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland
Region:	Zululand
Total speakers:	~9 million
Ranking:	87
Genetic classification:	Niger-Congo language family Atlantic-Congo Volta-Congo Benue-Congo languages Bantoid Southern Narrow Bantu Central S Nguni Zulu
Official status
Official language of:	South Africa
Regulated by:	-
Language codes
ISO 639-1	zu
ISO 639-2	zul
SIL	ZUU
See also: Language – List of languages

Zulu, also known as isiZulu, is a language of the Zulu people with about 9 million speakers, the vast majority (over 95%) of whom live in South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken language in South Africa, understood by over 50% of the population (Ethnologue 2005), and became one of South Africa's 11 official languages in 1994 at the end of apartheid.

1 Geographical distribution
2 History
3 Phonology
4 Grammar
5 Phrases
6 See also
7 Sources
8 Books
9 External links

Geographical distribution

Zulu belongs to the South-Eastern group of Bantu languages (the Nguni group).

The language is also widely spoken in kwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. It is also spoken in some other African countries, with significant Zulu-speaking populations in Lesotho and Swaziland. Ndebele, spoken in Zimbabwe, and the Ngoni language formerly spoken in Malawi are both closely related to Zulu; both developed from nineteenth century Zulu migrant populations.

History

The original Zulu homeland seem to have been in the region of modern Tanzania. The Zulu presence in South Africa dates from about the fourteenth century AD. A Zulu independent kingdom existed already in 1832.

The first written document wtitten in Zulu was a Bible translation that appeared in 1883. In 1901 John Dube (1871-1946), a Zulu from Natal, created the Ohlange Institute, the first native educational institution in South Africa. He was also the author of Insila kaChaka, the first novel written in Zulu (1933). Another pioneering Zulu writer was Reginald Dhlomo, author of several historical novels of the 19th-century leaders of the Zulu nation: : U-Dingane (1936), U-Shaka (1937), U-Mpande (1938), U-Cetshwayo (1952) and U-Dinizulu (1968).

The written form of Zulu is controlled by the Zulu Language Board of KwaZulu-Natal.

Phonology

One of its most distinctive features of Zulu is the use of click consonants. This feature is shared with several other languages of Southern Africa, but is almost unique to this region. There are three basic clicks in Zulu:

c - dental
q - alveolar
x - lateral

These can have several variants such as being voiced, aspirated or nasalised so that there are a total of about 15 different click sounds in Zulu. The same sounds occur in Xhosa, where they are used more frequently than in Zulu.

Grammar

Some of the main grammatical features of Zulu are:

Constituent word order is Subject Verb Object.
Morphologically, it is an agglutinative language.
As in other Bantu languages, nouns are classified in thirteen morphological classes, with different prefixes for singular and plural. Various parts of speech that qualify a noun must agree with the noun according to its morphological class. These agreements usually reflect part of the orginal class that it is agreeing with. An example of this is the use of the class 'aba-':

Bonke abantu abaqatha bepulazi bayayigawula.

All the strong people of the farm are felling (trees).

Here, the various agreement that qualify the word 'abantu' (people) can be seen in effect.

Its verbal system shows a combination of temporal and aspectual categories in their finite paradigm. Typically verbs have two stems, one for Present-Indefinite and another for Perfect. Different prefixes can be attached to these verbal stems to specify subject agreement and various degrees of past or future tense. For example, in the word uthanda ("he loves"), the Present stem of the evrb is -thanda, and the prefix u- expresses third-person singular subject.

Suffixes are also put into common use to show the causitive or reciprocal forms of a verb stem.

Most property words (words which are encoded as adjectives in English) are morphologically verbs, such is the sentence umuntu uBomvu ("the person is red"), the word uBomvu (root -Bomvu) behaves exactly as a verb, including the agreement prefix u-, as in the example above.

Phrases

The following is a list of phrases that can be used when visiting a region where the primary language is Zulu.

Sawubona (Hello to 1 person)
Sanibonani (Hello to a group of people)
Unjani (How are you? to 1 person)
Ninjani (How are you? to a group of people)
Ngiyaphila (I am well)
Ngiyabonga (I thank you)
Siyabonga (We thank you)
Isikhathi sithini? (What is the time?)
Uhlala kuphi? (Where do you stay?)
Eish (I am completely flabbergasted by what just happened, and words fail me.) (This is general South African slang, that is not only used by Zulu speakers or in Zulu speech)