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Tsonga Language
Tsonga () or Xitsonga ( ''Xitsonga'') as an endonym, is a Bantu language spoken by the Tsonga people of southern Africa. It is mutually intelligible with Tswa and Ronga and the name "Tsonga" is often used as a cover term for all three, also sometimes referred to as Tswa-Ronga. The Xitsonga language has been standardised for both academic and home use. Tsonga is an official language of South Africa, and under the name "Shangani" it is recognised as an official language in the Constitution of Zimbabwe. All Tswa-Ronga languages are recognised in Mozambique. It is not official in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). History The Xitsonga language was studied in great detail by the Swiss missionary, Henri-Alexandre Junod between the years 1890 and 1920, who made the conclusion that the Xitsonga language (which he called the "Thonga language" at the time) began to develop in Mozambique even before the 1400s. In his own words, Junod states the following: Further studies were carried ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tsonga People
The Tsonga people ( ts, Vatsonga) are a Bantu peoples, Bantu ethnic group primarily native to Southern Mozambique and South Africa (Limpopo and Mpumalanga). They speak Xitsonga, a Southern Bantu language. A very small number of Tsonga people are also found in Zimbabwe and Northern Eswatini. The Tsonga people of South Africa share some history with the Tsonga people of Southern Mozambique, and have similar cultural practices; however they differ on the dialects spoken. History The Tsonga people originated from Central and East Africa somewhere between AD 200 and 500, and have been migrating in-and-out of South Africa for over a thousand (1,000) years. Initially, the Tsonga people settled on the coastal plains of Northern Mozambique but finally settled in the Transvaal Province and around parts of St Lucia Bay in South Africa from as early as the 1300s.Junod, H.A (1912), ''The Life of a South African Tribe: The Social Life'', Imprimerie Attinger Freres, Neuchatel. One of the ea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eswatini
Eswatini ( ; ss, eSwatini ), officially the Kingdom of Eswatini and formerly named Swaziland ( ; officially renamed in 2018), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. It is bordered by Mozambique to its northeast and South Africa to its north, west, south, and southeast. At no more than north to south and east to west, Eswatini is one of the smallest countries in Africa; despite this, its climate and topography are diverse, ranging from a cool and mountainous highveld to a hot and dry lowveld. The population is composed primarily of ethnic Swazis. The prevalent language is Swazi (''siSwati'' in native form). The Swazis established their kingdom in the mid-18th century under the leadership of Ngwane III. The country and the Swazi take their names from Mswati II, the 19th-century king under whose rule the country was expanded and unified; its boundaries were drawn up in 1881 in the midst of the Scramble for Africa. After the Second Boer War, the kingdom, under the n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bantu Languages
The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The total number of Bantu languages ranges in the hundreds, depending on the definition of "language" versus "dialect", and is estimated at between 440 and 680 distinct languages."Guthrie (1967-71) names some 440 Bantu 'varieties', Grimes (2000) has 501 (minus a few 'extinct' or 'almost extinct'), Bastin ''et al.'' (1999) have 542, Maho (this volume) has some 660, and Mann ''et al.'' (1987) have ''c.'' 680." Derek Nurse, 2006, "Bantu Languages", in the ''Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics'', p. 2:Ethnologue report for Southern Bantoid" lists a total of 535 languages. The count includes 13 Mbam languages, which are not always included under "Narrow Bantu". For Bantuic, Linguasphere has 260 outer languages (which are equivalent to lan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nguni Languages
The Nguni languages are a group of closely related Bantu languages spoken in southern Africa by the Nguni peoples. Nguni languages include Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele (sometimes referred to as "Northern Ndebele"), and Swazi. The appellation "Nguni" derives from the Nguni cattle type. ''Ngoni'' (see below) is an older, or a shifted, variant. It is sometimes argued that the use of ''Nguni'' as a generic label suggests a historical monolithic unity of the people in question, where in fact the situation may have been more complex. The linguistic use of the label (referring to a subgrouping of Bantu) is relatively stable. From an English editorial perspective, the articles "a" and "an" are both used with "Nguni", but "a Nguni" is more frequent and arguably more correct if "Nguni" is pronounced as it is suggested. Classification Within a subset of Southern Bantu, the label "Nguni" is used both genetically (in the linguistic sense) and typologically (quite apart from any historica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nguni People
The Nguni people are a Bantu ethnic group from South Africa, with off-shoots in neighbouring countries in Southern Africa. Swazi (or Swati) people live in both South Africa and Eswatini, while Northern Ndebele people live in both South Africa (as immigrants) and Zimbabwe. A group of the Nguni living in present day Malawi and Zambia originated from South Africa and are known as AbaNgoni (or Ngoni/Nguni). The name AbaNgoni can be translated to "People who doesn't commit sins". Both the Ndebele of Zimbabwe and the Ngoni migrated northwards out of South Africa in the early 19th century, during a politically tumultuous era that included the so-called Mfecane and Great Trek. In South Africa, the historic Nguni kingdoms of the Ndebele, Swazi, Xhosa and Zulu are in the present-day provinces of Southern and Eastern Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga. The most notable of these kingdoms are the Zulu Kingdom, which was ruled by Shaka, a warrior king whose conquest ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chopi People
The Chopi are an ethnic group of Mozambique. They have lived primarily in the Zavala region of southern Mozambique, in the Inhambane Province. They traditionally lived a life of subsistence agriculture, traditionally living a rural existence, although many were displaced or killed in the civil war that followed Mozambique's liberation from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975. In addition, drought forced many away from their homeland and into the nation's cities. The Chopi speak Chichopi, a tonal language in the Bantu family, with many also speaking chiTsonga and Portuguese as secondary languages. They are related to the Tsonga people of Mozambique and South Africa and their neighbors include the Shangaan ethnic group who live to the west, in the Gaza Province, and who invaded Chopi territory in the 19th century. Historically, some Chopi were made subjects under Portuguese protection and others became migrant laborers in South Africa. The Chopi identify culturally, as a peo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henri-Alexandre Junod
Henri-Alexandre Junod (17 June 1863 Saint-Martin, Val-de-Ruz – 22 April 1934 Geneva) was a Swiss-born South African missionary, ethnographer, anthropologist, linguist and naturalist, stationed for much of his career at Shiluvane Mission Station outside Tzaneen in Limpopo Province. He received an early training in Protestant ministry at Neuchâtel, Basel and Berlin. He was one of the founding members of the Lemana Training College at village near the Township of Waterval at Elim in 1906. Together with Reverend Creux of Valdezia Mission Station, he codified the language of the Tsonga people, which they called 'Thonga', but later renamed Xitsonga. Together with a group of Swiss Missionaries, such as Georges Liengme, he helped in the establishment of Elim Hospital in 1899. He came from a family of clergy and missionaries and in 1885 received holy orders as a Protestant minister in the Independent Church of Neuchâtel. In 1887, after being accepted by the Mission Suisse Roma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ronga Language
Ronga (XiRonga; sometimes ShiRonga or GiRonga) is a Bantu language of the Tswa–Ronga branch spoken just south of Maputo in Mozambique. It extends a little into South Africa. It has about 650,000 speakers in Mozambique and a further 90,000 in South Africa, with dialects including Konde, Putru and Kalanga. The Swiss philologist Henri Alexandre Junod seems to have been the first linguist to have studied it, in the late 19th century. Phonology Alphabet Its alphabet is similar to that of Tsonga as provided by Methodist missionaries and Portuguese settlers. Grammar Ronga is grammatically so close to Tsonga in many ways that census officials have often considered it a dialect; its noun class system is very similar and its verbal forms are almost identical. Its most immediately noticeable difference is a much greater influence from Portuguese, due to being centred near the capital Maputo (formerly Lourenço Marques). Literature The first book to be published in Ronga wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tswa Language
Tswa (''Xitswa'') is a South-Eastern Bantu language in Southern Mozambique. Its closest relatives are Ronga and Tsonga, the three forming the Tswa–Ronga family of languages. Tswa is mainly spoken in the rural areas west of Inhambane. Its largest dialect, Hlengwe, extends westwards to Southern Zimbabwe; Maho (2009) considers this to be a distinct language. The other principal dialects are Dzibi (Dzivi) and Dzonga. According to some estimates, there are just over one million BaTswa, but not all can speak the Tswa language. Many Mozambicans, including census officials, often consider it a dialect of Tsonga. Alphabet Tswa uses a variant of the Latin alphabet previously used for Tsonga. It is partly based on those developed by the Portuguese colonists and Methodist missionaries to the region. The first major transliterator for the Tswa language into English was the Swede J. A. Persson, who consolidated the alphabet for Tswa specifically. ''Ŝ'' and ''Ẑ'' are lightly whistle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Endonym
An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, or linguistic community in question; it is their self-designated name for themselves, their homeland, or their language. An exonym (from Greek: , 'outer' + , 'name'; also known as xenonym) is an established, ''non-native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used only outside that particular place, group, or linguistic community. Exonyms exist not only for historico-geographical reasons but also in consideration of difficulties when pronouncing foreign words. For instance, is the endonym for the country that is also known by the exonym ''Germany'' in English, in Spanish and in French. Naming and etymology The terms ''autonym'', ''endonym'', ''exonym'' and ''xen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
South Africa 2011 Tsonga Speakers Proportion Map
South is one of the cardinal directions or compass points. The direction is the opposite of north and is perpendicular to both east and west. Etymology The word ''south'' comes from Old English ''sūþ'', from earlier Proto-Germanic ''*sunþaz'' ("south"), possibly related to the same Proto-Indo-European root that the word ''sun'' derived from. Some languages describe south in the same way, from the fact that it is the direction of the sun at noon (in the Northern Hemisphere), like Latin meridies 'noon, south' (from medius 'middle' + dies 'day', cf English meridional), while others describe south as the right-hand side of the rising sun, like Biblical Hebrew תֵּימָן teiman 'south' from יָמִין yamin 'right', Aramaic תַּימנַא taymna from יָמִין yamin 'right' and Syriac ܬܰܝܡܢܳܐ taymna from ܝܰܡܝܺܢܳܐ yamina (hence the name of Yemen, the land to the south/right of the Levant). Navigation By convention, the ''bottom or down-facing side'' of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Signed Tsonga
In South Africa, manually coded language is used in education, as a bridge between South African Sign Language (SASL) and the eleven official oral languages of the country. These codes apply the signs of SASL to the grammar of the oral languages, resulting in Signed English, Signed Afrikaans, Signed Xhosa, Signed Zulu, etc. They are not a natural form of communication among deaf people. Manually coded language is commonly used instead of SASL for simultaneous translation from an oral language into sign, for example at the Deaf Forum that is held annually at different locations in the Western Cape. The result is that, while deaf people from different language communities can communicate with each other without difficulty in SASL, they cannot understand "sign language" interpreters unless they have been schooled in the particular manually coded language used by the interpreter. That is, while they share a common language in SASL, they differ in their understanding of Signed Engl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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