Zulu Newspaper Reader - Dunwoody Press
Zulu Newspaper Reader - Dunwoody Press
Zulu Newspaper Reader - Dunwoody Press
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INTRODUCTION<br />
<strong>Zulu</strong>, known as isi<strong>Zulu</strong> by its speakers, who call themselves<br />
ama<strong>Zulu</strong> (sg. um<strong>Zulu</strong>), is one of South Africa’s eleven official<br />
languages. It is dominant in the province Kwa<strong>Zulu</strong>-Natal, where<br />
there are over 7,500,000 speakers of the language. Overall in South<br />
Africa, with over 10 million speakers, it is the language with the<br />
largest number of speakers, constituting 23.8% of the population.<br />
It is to a large extent mutually understandable with Xhosa (found<br />
mainly in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces), and Swati<br />
(found mainly in the Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces – as well<br />
as being the major language of neighboring Swaziland), and with<br />
Zimbabwean Ndebele, which is one of the two major languages of<br />
that country. These four languages, with several minor dialects,<br />
make up the language cluster known as Nguni. The combined total<br />
of speakers of the Nguni languages in South Africa number some 20<br />
million representing ±45% of the population.<br />
<strong>Zulu</strong> is a member of the large Bantu family of ±600 languages which<br />
are spoken south of the so-called ‘Bantu line,’ which runs from<br />
Nigeria, across the Central African Republic, the Democratic<br />
Republic of Congo, Uganda and Kenya to southern Somalia. Not all<br />
languages spoken south of this line are Bantu or even related to<br />
Bantu. North of this line a large number of languages are spoken,<br />
which are related to Bantu, in many cases very distantly, and which,<br />
together with Bantu, constitute the Niger-Congo language family.<br />
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