Dabelle found out that there are eleven (yes, you read that right, eleven) official languages in South Africa: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, SiSwati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu. In this series, I have been sharing the more interesting ones used in South African English – many of which derived from at least one of these languages.
On her search for a word containing an ‘X’ Dabelle found very few that are used in SA English. But she did find an ‘X’ in the list of languages: Xhosa!
Here are some facts about it. Xhosa is:
- a Nguni Bantu language with click consonants (the word “Xhosa” begins with a click)
- spoken as a first language by 8.2 million people and by 11 million as a second language in South Africa, mostly in Eastern Cape Province
- a tonal language; the same sequence of consonants and vowels can have different meanings, depending on intonation [all facts from Wikipedia]
The stem word Xhosa forms part of many other words, for example
- A Xhosa person is umXhosa
- The Xhosa people are amaXhosa
- The Xhosa language is isiXhosa
Does your country have any interesting language facts?
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PS: To read all my A to Z posts, click on the Dibzen-AtoZChallenge tag.