North Sotho
North Sotho | ||
---|---|---|
Spoken in |
Republic of South Africa , Botswana | |
speaker | 5 million | |
Linguistic classification |
||
Official status | ||
Official language in | Republic of South Africa | |
Language codes | ||
ISO 639 -1 |
- |
|
ISO 639 -2 |
nso |
|
ISO 639-3 |
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
- Description on the website of the Institute for Asian and African Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin
Individual evidence
- ^ Institute of Race Relations : South Africa Survey 2017 . Johannesburg 2017, p. 74
- ^ M. Reh: Sotho. In: H. Glück (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexikon Sprache . Bamberg 1993, p. 562.