Venda or Tshivenda is a Bantu language and an official language of

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...

. It is mainly spoken by the

Venda people The Venḓa (VhaVenḓa or Vhangona) are a Southern African Bantu people living mostly near the South African-Zimbabwean border. The history of the Venda starts from the Kingdom of Mapungubwe (9th Century) where King Shiriyadenga was the f ...

in the northern part of South Africa's Limpopo province, as well as by some

Lemba people The Lemba, Remba, or Mwenye are a Bantu-speaking ethnic group which is native to Zimbabwe and South Africa, with smaller branches in Mozambique and Malawi. According to Tudor Parfitt, when he first worked in the field among the Lemba in South ...

. The Venda language is related to Kalanga, which is spoken in Zimbabwe and Botswana. During the

apartheid Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...

era of South Africa, the

bantustan A Bantustan (also known as Bantu homeland, black homeland, black state or simply homeland; ) was a territory that the National Party administration of South Africa set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now ...

Venda Venda () was a Bantustan in northern South Africa, which is fairly close to the South African border with Zimbabwe to the north, while to the south and east, it shared a long border with another black homeland, Gazankulu. It is now part of the ...

was set up to cover the Venda speakers of South Africa. According to the 2011 census, Venda speakers are concentrated in the following areas:

Makhado Local Municipality Makhado Local Municipality is located in the Vhembe District Municipality of Limpopo province, South Africa. The seat of Makhado Local Municipality Louis Trichardt. Main places The 2001 census divided the municipality into the following main pl ...

, with 350,000 people;

Thulamela Local Municipality The Thulamela Local Municipality is a Local municipality in the Limpopo province of South Africa. Its municipal boundaries were greatly altered after the South African municipal elections, 2016 when much of the area that formerly belonged to the m ...

, with 370,000 people;

Musina Local Municipality Musina Local Municipality is located in the Vhembe District Municipality of Limpopo province, South Africa, and is the northernmost local municipality in South Africa. It borders on Botswana and Zimbabwe. The seat of Musina Local Municipality is ...

, with 35,000 people; and

Mutale Local Municipality Mutale Local Municipality was a municipality located in the Vhembe District Municipality of Limpopo province, South Africa. The seat of Mutale Local Municipality was Mutale. It is now part of Thulamela and Musina Local Municipalities. Main places ...

, with 89,000 people. The total number of speakers in Vhembe district currently stands at 844,000. In Gauteng province, there are 275,000 Venda speakers. Fewer than 10,000 are spread across the rest of the country — for a total number of Venda speakers in South Africa at 1.2 million people or just 2.2% of South Africa's population, making Venda speakers the second smallest minority language in South Africa, after the Ndebele language, which number 1.1 million speakers.

Writing system

The Venda language uses the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...

with five additional accented letters. There are four

dental consonant A dental consonant is a consonant articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as , . In some languages, dentals are distinguished from other groups, such as alveolar consonants, in which the tongue contacts the gum ridge. Dental c ...

s with a

circumflex accent The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...

below the letter (''ḓ, ḽ, ṋ, ṱ'') and an

overdot When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot is usually reserved for the '' interpunct'' ( · ), or to the glyphs "combining dot above" ( ◌̇ ) and "combining dot below" ( ◌̣ ) which may be combined with some letters of t ...

for

velar Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the velum). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive a ...

''ṅ''. Five vowel letters are used to write seven vowels. The letters C, J and Q are used only for foreign words and names.

Unicode

The extra letters have the following

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

names: * Ḓ U+1E12 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * ḓ U+1E13 LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * Ḽ U+1E3C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * ḽ U+1E3D LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * Ṅ U+1E44 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH DOT ABOVE * ṅ U+1E45 LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH DOT ABOVE * Ṋ U+1E4A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * ṋ U+1E4B LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * Ṱ U+1E70 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW * ṱ U+1E71 LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW

Luṱhofunḓeraru lwa Mibvumo

The ''sintu'' writing system ''Isibheqe Sohlamvu/

Ditema tsa Dinoko Ditema tsa Dinoko ( Sesotho for "Ditema syllabary"), also known by its IsiZulu name, ''Isibheqe Sohlamvu'', and various other related names in different languages, is a constructed writing system (specifically, a featural syllabary) for the '' ...

'', known technically in Venda as ''Luṱhofunḓeraru lwa Mibvumo'', is also used for the Venda language.

Phonology

Venda distinguishes dental ''ṱ, ṱh, ḓ, ṋ, ḽ'' from alveolar ''t, th, d, n, l'' as well as (like in Ewe)

labiodental In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth. Labiodental consonants in the IPA The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are: The IPA chart shades out ''labio ...

''f, v'' from

bilabial In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips. Frequency Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tli ...

''fh, vh'' (the last two are slightly rounded). There are no clicks; ''x'' has the sound of ''ch'' in ''loch'' or ''Bach''. As in other South African languages like Zulu, ''ph, ṱh, th, kh'' are aspirated and the "plain" stops ''p, ṱ, t,'' and ''k'' are

ejective In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some ...

Vowels

There are five vowel sounds: .

Consonants

A labiodental nasal sound appears in prenasalised consonant sounds, and is often used from loanwords. Labiovelar sounds occur as alternatives to labiopalatal sounds and may also be pronounced .

Fortition Fortition, also known as strengthening, is a consonantal change that increases the degree of stricture. It is the opposite of the more common lenition. For example, a fricative or an approximant may become a stop (i.e. becomes or becomes ). A ...

of occurs after nasal prefixes, likely to .Jeff Mielke, 2008. ''The emergence of distinctive features'', p 139ff

Tones

Venda has a specified tone, , with unmarked syllables having a low tone. Phonetic falling tone occurs only in sequences of more than one vowel or on the penultimate syllable if the vowel is long. Tone patterns exist independently of the consonants and vowels of a word and so they are word tones. Venda tone also follows

Meeussen's rule Meeussen's rule is a special case of tone reduction in Bantu languages. The tonal alternation it describes is the lowering, in some contexts, of the last tone of a pattern of two adjacent High tones (HH), resulting in the pattern HL. The phenomenon ...

: when a word beginning with a high tone is preceded by that high tone, the initial high tone is lost. (That is, there cannot be two adjacent marked high tones in a word, but high tone spreads allophonically to a following non-tonic ("low"-tone) syllable.) There are only a few tone patterns in Venda words (no tone, a single high tone on some syllable, two non-adjacent high tones), which behave as follows:

References

Sources

*G. Poulos, ''A linguistic analysis of Venda'', 1990.

External links

Tshivenḓa Grammar Guide
by Zach Gershkoff, US

Peace Corps The Peace Corps is an independent agency and program of the United States government that trains and deploys volunteers to provide international development assistance. It was established in March 1961 by an executive order of President John F ...

(2012).
PanAfrican L10n page on VendaYoung kasahorow Dictionary in Venda

Software

Translate.org.za
Project to translate Free and Open Source Software into all the official languages of South Africa, including Venda {{DEFAULTSORT:Venda language Southern Bantu languages Languages of South Africa Languages of Zimbabwe