North Sotho

North Sotho
Spoken in	Republic of South Africa , Botswana
speaker	5 million
Linguistic classification	Niger Congo Languages Benue Congo languages Bantoid languages Bantu languages Sotho Tswana languages North Sotho
Official status
Official language in	Republic of South Africa
Language codes
ISO 639 -1	-
ISO 639 -2	nso
ISO 639-3	nso

Proportion of North Sotho speakers in South Africa (2011)

Density of North Sotho speakers in South Africa (2011)

North Sotho (also: Sepedi, Pedi or Transvaal-Sotho) is a Bantu language that is particularly widespread in the former Transvaal Province (Republic of South Africa ) and southern Botswana and, together with Sesotho (South Sotho) and Setswana, belongs to the subgroup of the Sotho Tswana languages . It is primarily the mother tongue of Pedi and the official language in South Africa.

In South Africa, 9.44 percent of the population aged 15 and over (as of 2015) use it as their mother tongue .

The Northern Sotho is almost identical to the Sesotho and closely related to the Setswana. "The Latin-based writing at the beginning of the 20th century led to different writing traditions for Northern Sotho ( Limpopo and Mpumalanga ) on the one hand and Sesotho (mainly Orange Free State and Lesotho ) on the other."

Lutheran missionaries of the Berlin Mission Society , especially Karl Endemann , played an important role in the writing of the language. This created a standard language from the many dialects of North Sotho.

Web links

Commons : North Sotho  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Description on the website of the Institute for Asian and African Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin

Individual evidence

1. ^ Institute of Race Relations : South Africa Survey 2017 . Johannesburg 2017, p. 74
2. ^ M. Reh: Sotho. In: H. Glück (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexikon Sprache . Bamberg 1993, p. 562.