LWM 30: Northern Sotho

 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.