| Also Known As: Isixhosa,Cauzuh,Kaffir,Koosa,Caffre,Xosa,Cafre,Kaffer,Xhosa
Description:
Xhosa (pronounced [ˈkǁʰoːsa] , isiXhosa) is one of the official languages of South Africa. Xhosa is spoken by approximately 7.9 million people, or about 18% of the South African population. Like most Bantu languages, Xhosa is a tonal language, that is, the same sequence of consonants and vowels can have different meanings when said with a rising or falling or high or low intonation. One of the most distinctive features of the language is the prominence of click consonants; The word "Xhosa," the name of the language itself, begins with a click.
Xhosa is written using a Latin alphabet-based system. Three letters are used to indicate the basic clicks: c for dental clicks, x for lateral clicks, and q for palatal clicks (for a more detailed explanation, see the table of consonant phonemes, below). Tones are not indicated in the written form.
Xhosa is the southernmost branch of the Nguni languages, related to Swati, Northern Ndebele and Zulu. There is some mutual intelligibility with Swati, Northern Ndebele and Zulu, a Northern Ndebele and Xhosa share many linguistic features. Nguni languages are in turn part of a larger group of Bantu languages, and as such Xhosa is related to languages..... full article at Wikipedia |
