Southern Ndebele language

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This article relates to the Southern Ndebele languages and peoples of the Transvaal region of South Africa. For information about the language spoken by the Ndebele people of Zimbabwe (sometimes called Matabele Sindebele or Northern Ndebele) please see Sindebele language.

The Southern Ndebele language (isiNdebele or Nrebele in Southern Ndebele) is an African language belonging to the Nguni group of Bantu languages, and spoken by the amaNdebele (the Ndebele people of South Africa). There are two dialects of Southern Ndebele in South Africa:

the Northern Transvaal Ndebele or Nrebele,
and the Southern Transvaal Ndebele.

There is also another, separate dialect called Northern Ndebele or Matabele spoken in Zimbabwe and Botswana - see Sindebele language. The Zimbabwean Ndebele is closer to Zulu than it is to the two South-African Ndebele languages.

Overview

The first group of Southern Ndebele speakers are found in the Limpopo Province (formerly Northern Transvaal or Northern Province) of South Africa around the Towns of Mokopane (Potgietersrus) and Polokwane (Pietersburg). Unfortunately this language was never taken seriously, so it was never taught at school and neither did anyone sit down and compile a proper orthography. The language is sometimes mistakenly grouped under the Northern Sotho group of dialects. This language is becoming extinct. The new generation mostly speaks Northern Sotho.

One of the Ndebele people's famous achievements is that they caught the Afrikaners by surprise and killed one of their leaders Piet Potgieter. The Afrikaners built a monument and called it "Moorddrift". As revenge the Ndebele King was killed in his cave refuge, together with a few of his followers.

This group is sometimes called BaTlou. If this language were to be further grouped it would be grouped with Swazi, because of their use of the root ti- as opposed to izi- for example:

Singular nkxomo - plural tinkxomo (in Ndebele)
Singular inkomo - plural tinkomo (in Swazi)
Singular inkomo - plural izinkomo (in Zulu)

The second group of Ndebele speakers is found in the Mpumalanga and Gauteng Province of South Africa. This group's language was not considered notable, and for years the children were taught Zulu instead. However, the apartheid government still created a Bantustan for them called KwaNdebele, and with this came a radio station, Radio Ndebele. In the new South Africa the name of the station was changed to Ikhwekhwezi, meaning Star. This station has expanded its footprint to include the Northern Ndebele region. The language still retains most of its own vocabulary with a few Northern Sotho and Afrikaans words trickling in.

The Ndebele people have recently become famous for their colourful wall paintings and traditional garb. Their paintings are used for instance to attract tourists and were used to decorate tails of 15 British Airways jets as part of their ethnic art relaunch.

External links

[List links to Ndebele language resources]
[The 1971 Pelling lexicon of Ndebele->English (text file)] (on a stable Archive.org link)
[Searchable version of the Pelling dictionnary]
[CBOLD - Comparative Bantu Online Dictionnary] - including Ndebele
[Project translating Free Software into Ndebele]

Official languages of the Republic of South Africa
Afrikaans \| English \| isiNdebele \| Sepedi \| Sesotho Setswana \| Siswati \| Xitsonga \| Tshivenda \| isiXhosa \| isiZulu

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