Fun fact

Dabelle found out that there are eleven (yes, you read that right, eleven) official languages in South Africa: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, SiSwati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu.  In this series, I have been sharing the more interesting ones used in South African English – many of which derived from at least one of these languages.

On her search for a word containing an ‘X’ Dabelle found very few that are used in SA English. But she did find an ‘X’ in the list of languages: Xhosa!

Here are some facts about it. Xhosa is:

• a Nguni Bantu language with click consonants (the word “Xhosa” begins with a click)
• spoken as a first language by 8.2 million people and by 11 million as a second language in South Africa, mostly in Eastern Cape Province
• a tonal language; the same sequence of consonants and vowels can have different meanings, depending on intonation [all facts from Wikipedia]

The stem word Xhosa forms part of many other words, for example

• A Xhosa person is umXhosa
• The Xhosa people are amaXhosa
• The Xhosa language is isiXhosa

Does your country have any interesting language facts? 

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PS: To read all my A to Z posts, click on the Dibzen-AtoZChallenge tag.