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Most Sesotho speakers in South Africa reside in Free State and Gauteng. Sesotho is also the main language spoken by the people of Lesotho, where, according to 1993 data, it was spoken by about 1,493,000 people, or 85% of the population. The census fails to record other South Africans for whom Sesotho is a second or third language.
Although the month names are often not used by the general public (being considered part of "deep Sesotho"), they are regularly used in news broadcasts and other media and are more common than English imports. Additionally, the names of the seasons and the days of the week are regularly used by all speakers.
The Sesotho language may be described in several ways depending on the aspect being considered. It is an agglutinative language. It constructs whole words by joining discrete roots and morphemes with specific meanings, and may also modify words by similar processes. Its basic word order is SVO. However, because the verb is marked with the ...
The language of the Basotho is referred to as Sesotho, [24] less commonly known as Sesotho sa borwa. [25] Some texts may refer to Sesotho as "Southern Sotho" to differentiate it from Northern Sotho, also called Sepedi. Sesotho is the first language of 1.5 million people in Lesotho, or 85% of the population. [19]
Southern Sotho or Sotho (SeSotho): Phuthi, Taung Northern Sotho, which appears largely to be a taxonomic holding category for what is Sotho-Tswana but neither identifiably Southern Sotho nor Tswana, [ 3 ] subsumes highly varied dialects including Pedi ( Sepedi ), Tswapo ( Setswapo ), Lovedu ( Khilobedu ), Pai and Pulana.
Ditema tsa Dinoko (Sesotho for "Ditema syllabary"), also known as ditema tsa Sesotho, is a constructed writing system (specifically, a featural syllabary) for the siNtu or Southern Bantu languages (such as Sesotho, Setswana, IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, SiSwati, SiPhuthi, Xitsonga, EMakhuwa, ChiNgoni, SiLozi, ChiShona and Tshivenḓa).
In isiZulu the forms are very predictable, with suffixes of the form aCa generally changing to eCe (aCa + ile ⇒; aiCe ⇒; eCe). ^ The fact that this is indeed the simple copulative (and not just a prefix that happens to be allomorphic with it) is evidenced by looking at these verbs in a language such as isiZulu where the simple copulative is much more complicated and yet coincides perfectly ...
Many Sesotho nouns (and other parts of speech) stem from contact with speakers of Indo-European languages, primarily French missionaries, Orange Free State Afrikaners, and, in modern times, English people. The very alien phonetics and phonologies of these languages mean that words are to be imported rather irregularly with varying phonetic ...