Zulu language

Zulu
isiZulu
Spoken in
Region	Zululand, Durban, Johannesburg
Total speakers	First language - 10 million Second language - 16 million
Ranking	68
Language family	Niger-Congo Atlantic-Congo Benue-Congo Bantoid Southern Bantoid Bantu Southern Bantu Nguni Zunda Zulu
Official status
Official language in	South Africa
Regulated by	Pan South African Language Board
Language codes
ISO 639-1	zu
ISO 639-2	zul
ISO 639-3	zul
Linguasphere
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Zulu (Zulu: isiZulu) is the language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority (over 95%) of whom live in South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa (24% of the population) as well as being understood by over 50% of the population (Ethnologue 2005). It became one of South Africa's eleven official languages in 1994. Like many other Bantu languages, it is written using the Latin alphabet.

Geographical distribution

Geographical distribution of isiZulu in South Africa: proportion of the population that speaks isiZulu at home.

0–20%      20–40%      40–60%

60–80%      80–100%      No population

Geographical distribution of isiZulu in South Africa: density of isiZulu home-language speakers.

<1 /km²      1–3 /km²      3–10 /km²      10–30 /km²      30–100 /km²

100–300 /km²      300–1000 /km²      1000–3000 /km²      >3000 /km²

Zulu belongs to the South-Eastern group of Bantu languages (the Nguni group).

Zulu migrant populations have taken it to adjacent regions, especially to Zimbabwe, where Zulu is called (Northern) Ndebele.

Xhosa, the predominant language in the Eastern Cape, is often considered mutually intelligible with Zulu.

History

Much like the Xhosa who had moved into South Africa during earlier waves of the Bantu migrations, the Zulu assimilated many sounds from the San and Khoi languages of the country's earliest inhabitants. This has resulted in the preservation of click consonants in Zulu and Xhosa, (the sounds are unique to Southern and Eastern Africa except for the Australian Aborigine Damin ceremonial language) despite the extinction of many San and Khoi languages.

Zulu, like all indigenous Southern African languages, was an oral language until contact with missionaries from Europe, who documented the language using the Latin alphabet. The first grammar book of the Zulu language was published in Norway in 1850 by the Norwegian missionary Hans Schreuder.^[1] The first written document in Zulu was a Bible translation that appeared in 1883. In 1901, John Dube (1871–1946), a Zulu from Natal, created the Ohlange Institute, the first native educational institution in South Africa. He was also the author of Insila kaShaka, the first novel written in isiZulu (1933). Another pioneering Zulu writer was Reginald Dhlomo, author of several historical novels of the 19th-century leaders of the Zulu nation: U-Dingane (1936), U-Shaka (1937), U-Mpande (1938), U-Cetshwayo (1952) and U-Dinizulu (1968). Other notable contributors to Zulu literature include Benedict Wallet Vilakazi and, more recently, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali.

The written form of Zulu was controlled by the Zulu Language Board of KwaZulu-Natal. This board has now been disbanded and superseded by the Pan South African Language Board that promotes the use of all eleven official languages of South Africa.

Contemporary usage

English, Dutch and later Afrikaans had been the only official languages used by all South African governments before 1994. However in the Kwazulu bantustan the Zulu language was widely used. All education in the country at the high-school level was in English or Afrikaans. Since the demise of apartheid in 1994, Zulu has been enjoying a marked revival. Zulu-language television was introduced by the SABC in the early 1980s and it broadcasts news and many shows in Zulu. Zulu radio is very popular and newspapers such as isoLezwe, Ilanga and UmAfrika in the Zulu language are available, mainly available in Kwazulu-Natal province and in Johannesburg. In January 2005 the first full length feature film in Zulu, Yesterday was nominated for an Oscar.

South African matriculation requirements no longer specify which South African language needs to be taken as a second language, and some people have made the switch to learning Zulu. However people taking Zulu at high-school level overwhelmingly take it as first language: according to statistics, Afrikaans is still over 30 times more popular than Zulu as a second language. The mutual intelligibility of many Nguni languages, has increased the likelihood of Zulu becoming the lingua franca of the Eastern half of the country although the political dominance of Xhosa-speaking people on national level militates against this really happening. (The predominant language in the Western Cape and Northern Cape is Afrikaans - see the map below.

In the 1994 film The Lion King, in the "Circle of Life" song, the phrases Ingonyama nengw' enamabala (English: A lion and a leopard come to this open place), Nants ingonyama bakithi Baba (English: Here comes a lion, Father) and Siyo nqoba (English: We will conquer) were used. In some movie songs, like "This Land", the voice says Busa Le Lizwe bo (Rule this land) and Busa ngothando bo (Rule with love) were used too.

Standard vs urban Zulu

Standard Zulu as it is taught in schools, also called "deep Zulu" (isiZulu esijulile), differs in various repects from the language spoken by people living in cities (urban Zulu, isiZulu sasedolobheni). Standard Zulu tends to be purist, using derivations from Zulu words for new concepts, whereas speakers of urban Zulu use loan words abundantly, mainly from English. For example:

This situation has led to problems in education because standard Zulu is often not understood by young people.^[2]

Phonetics

Vowels

Vowels are lengthened in the penultimate syllable.

Consonants

Click consonants

One of the most distinctive features of Zulu is the use of click consonants. This feature is shared with several other languages of Southern Africa, but is almost entirely confined to this region. There are three basic clicks in Zulu:

• c - dental (comparable to a sucking of teeth)
• q - alveolar (comparable to a bottle top 'pop')
• x - lateral (comparable to a click one may do for a walking horse)

These can have several variants such as being voiced, aspirated or nasalised so that there are a total of about 15 different click sounds in Zulu. The same sounds occur in Xhosa, where they are used more frequently than in Zulu.

Tone

Like the great majority of other Bantu and African languages, Zulu is tonal. It is conventionally written without any indication of tone, despite the fact that tone is distinctive in Zulu. For example, the word for priest and teacher is umfundisi, but they are pronounced with a different tone depending on the meaning.

Zulu is also known for having depressor consonants, which lower a high tone in the same syllable. For example, the verbs ukuhlala "to live" and ukudlala "to play" should both contain a high tone on the penultimate syllable. However, the tone on the penultimate syllable of ukudlala is low as a result of the depressor consonant [X]

Grammar

Some of the main grammatical features of Zulu are:

• Constituent word order is Subject Verb Object.
• Morphologically, it is an agglutinative language.
• As in other Bantu languages, Zulu nouns are classified into fifteen morphological classes (or genders), with different prefixes for singular and plural. Various parts of speech that qualify a noun must agree with the noun according to its gender. These agreements usually reflect part of the original class that it is agreeing with. An example of this is the use of the class 'aba-':

Bonke abantu abaqatha basepulazini bayagawula.

All the strong people of the farm are felling (trees).

Here, the various agreement that qualify the word 'abantu' (people) can be seen in effect.

• Its verbal system shows a combination of temporal and aspectual categories in their finite paradigm. Typically verbs have two stems, one for Present-Indefinite and another for Perfect. Different prefixes can be attached to these verbal stems to specify subject agreement and various degrees of past or future tense. For example, in the word uyathanda ("he loves"), the Present stem of the verb is -thanda, the prefix u- expresses third-person singular subject and -ya- is a filler used in short sentences.

Suffixes are also put into common use to show the causative or reciprocal forms of a verb stem.

• Most property words (words which are encoded as adjectives in English) are represented by things called relatives, such is the sentence umuntu ubomvu ("the person is red"), the word ubomvu (root -bomvu) behaves similarly to a verb and uses the agreement prefix u-, but there are subtle differences, for example, it does not use the prefix ya-.

Phrases

The following is a list of phrases that can be used when visiting a region where the primary language is Zulu.

Sample text

(From the preamble to the South African Constitution)

Thina, bantu baseNingizimu Afrika, Siyakukhumbula ukucekelwa phansi kwamalungelo okwenzeka eminyakeni eyadlula; Sibungaza labo abahluphekela ubulungiswa nenkululeko kulo mhlaba wethu; Sihlonipha labo abasebenzela ukwakha nokuthuthukisa izwe lethu; futhi Sikholelwa ekutheni iNingizimu Afrika ingeyabo bonke abahlala kuyo, sibumbene nakuba singafani.

Translation:

We, the people of South Africa, Recognize the injustices of our past; Honor those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land; Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.

Common place names in Zulu

Zulu place names usually occur in their locative form, which combines what would in English be separate prepositions with the name concerned. This is usually achieved by simply replacing the i- prefix with an e- prefix (for example, 'eGoli' translates literally as 'to/at/in/from Johannesburg' when iGoli is simply Johannesburg), but changes in the name can also occur (see Durban below). The locatives are given in brackets.

• South Africa - iNingizimu Afrika / uMzansi Afrika
• Durban - iTheku (eThekwini)
• Johannesburg - iGoli (eGoli)
• Cape Town - iKapa (eKapa)
• Pretoria - iPitoli (ePitoli)
• Pietermaritzburg - uMgungundlovu (eMgungundlovu)
• Ladysmith - uMnambithi (eMnambithi)
• Overseas - phesheya

The 'Zulu'/'isiZulu' debate

The Zulu language is called 'isiZulu' in Zulu, 'isi-' being the prefix associated with languages (e.g., isiNgisi = English, isiXhosa = Xhosa, isiBhunu = Afrikaans, isiJalimane = German, etc.).

The root word Zulu can take many other forms in Zulu, each with a different meaning. Here is a table showing how the meanings of two roots - Zulu and ntu - change according to their prefix.

Some prefer to call Zulu isiZulu in English as per the Zulu name for the language.

Zulu words in South African English

South African English has absorbed many words from the Zulu language. Others, such as the names of local animals (impala and mamba are both Zulu names) have made their way into standard English. A few examples of Zulu words used in South African English:

• Muti (from umuthi) - medicine
• Donga (from udonga) - ditch (udonga actually means 'wall' in Zulu)
• Indaba - conference (it means 'an item of news' in Zulu)
• inDuna - chief or leader
• Shongololo (from ishongololo) - millipede
• Ubuntu - compassion/humanity.

Books

• Dent, G.R. and Nyembezi, C.L.S. (1959) Compact Zulu Dictionary. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter. ISBN 0-7960-0760-8
• Dent, G.R. and Nyembezi, C.L.S. (1969) Scholar's Zulu Dictionary. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter. ISBN 0-7960-0718-7
• Doke, C.M. (1947) Text-book of Zulu grammar. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
• Doke, C.M. (1953) Zulu-English Dictionary. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. ISBN 1-86814-160-8
• Doke, C.M. (1958) Zulu-English Vocabulary. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. ISBN 0-85494-009-X
• Nyembezi, C.L.S. (1957) Learn Zulu. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter. ISBN 0-7960-0237-1
• Nyembezi, C.L.S. (1970) Learn More Zulu. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter. ISBN 0-7960-0278-9
• Wilkes, Arnett, Teach Yourself Zulu. ISBN 0-07-143442-9
• Colenso, John William (1882). First steps in Zulu: being an elementary grammar of the Zulu language (Third ed.). Martizburg, Durban: Davis. http://www.archive.org/details/firststepsinzulu00coleuoft. 

See also

• Bantu language
• List of Zulu first names
• Nguni culture
• Shaka Zulu
• Tsotsitaal - a Zulu-based creole language spoken in Soweto
• UCLA Language Materials Project
• Zulu (the ethnic group)
• Swadesh list of Zulu words

Sources

• UCLA Language Materials Project - Zulu

References

External links

• Ethnologue report on Zulu
• South African Languages -- IsiZulu
• A short English - isiZulu - Japanese phraselist incl. sound file

Grammars

• Sifunda isiZulu!
• Funda Manje!
• University Of South Africa, free online course

Dictionaries

• isiZulu.net Zulu - English Online Dictionary
• Zulu - English Dictionary

Newspapers

• Isolezwe
• Ilanga
• UmAfrika

Software

• Spell checker for OpenOffice.org and Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox web-browser, and Mozilla Thunderbird email program in Zulu
• Translate.org.za Project to translate Free and Open Source Software into all the official languages of South Africa including Zulu
• PanAfrican L10n wiki page on Zulu

Literature and culture

• KwaZulu-Natal Literary Map

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