Xhosa

Story

isiXhosa is a Bantu language of the Nguni branch and carries one of the heaviest functional loads of click consonants of any Bantu language, with clicks appearing in roughly 17 percent of its lexicon. The ancestral Bantu language had no clicks at all; they were absorbed through deep and prolonged contact with Khoisan-speaking peoples of southern Africa, and about 15 percent of core Xhosa vocabulary is of Khoisan origin. Xhosa has three places of click articulation, written c, x, and q, and each can be produced in multiple ways including aspirated, nasalised, and voiced variants, yielding 15 distinct click phonemes. It is the language of Nelson Mandela and Miriam Makeba, and one of twelve official languages of South Africa.

At a glance

• Also known as: isiXhosa
• Family: Niger-Congo
• Region: Southern Africa
• Speakers: 19M (total speakers (l1 plus l2): approximately 9.8 million l1 (2022 census) plus an estimated 11 million l2 speakers)
• Writing system: Latin
• Greeting: Molo (hello to one person)

Spoken in

South Africa, Lesotho, Zimbabwe

Common questions