LWM 30: Northern Sotho
Product no.: ISBN 9783929075434
Description
Northern Sotho
Louis J. Louwrens, Ingeborg M. Kosch andAlbert E. Kotzé
University of South Africa
Amongst the immense diversity of the languages of Africa one finds the Bantu languages which number close to a thousand including dialects. Within the Southeastern zone of the Bantu language family, subgroups such as the Sotho and Nguni groups, Tsonga and Venda are distinguished, Northern Sotho belongs to the Sotho group together with Tswana and Southern Sotho. Geographically speakers of Northern Sotho are mostly concentrated in the Northern and Northeastern parts of the Transvaal. There are about 3,5 million mothertongue speakers.
Typologically Northern Sotho is an agglutinative language. It is characterised by a system of noun classes and concordial agreement. Concordance is established by means of prefixal elements. Tone plays an important role in distinguishing the lexical meaning of words, but is also used to determine the grammatical character of words.
The present volume presents among others, interesting sociolinguistic data, salient phonemic and orthographic facts, an outline of the nominal and verbal morphology, syntactic and discourse related phenomena, as well as sample texts with interlinear transcription and translation.
ISBN 9783929075434. Languages of the World/Materials 30. 62pp. 1995.
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