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Language Lineage

Kusi

The southern Bantu languages (Ehret's 'Kusi', 'south'), including Shona, Sotho-Tswana and the Nguni languages. Nguni borrowed click consonants from Khoe and San neighbours.

c. 1st millennium CE – presentSouthern Africa: Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Botswana
On this page
  1. Origins
  2. Borrowed Clicks
  3. Upheaval, Print and Constitution
  4. In its own words
  5. Where it's spoken
  6. Turning points

01

Origins

In the first millennium CE, Bantu-speaking farmers and iron-workers spread into southern Africa, bringing cattle, sorghum and millet into lands long occupied by Khoe herders and San hunter-gatherers. Their languages developed into the southern Bantu groups: Shona in Zimbabwe, whose speakers built Great Zimbabwe, Sotho-Tswana on the highveld, Tsonga and Venda, and Nguni (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Ndebele) along the east coast.

02

Borrowed Clicks

Clicks are rare in the world's languages and are native only to the Khoe and San languages of southern Africa and a few in Tanzania. Yet Xhosa and Zulu have them in thousands of words, and Xhosa has some fifteen click consonants. They entered through long contact and intermarriage with Khoe and San speakers. One route was hlonipha, a custom of respectful avoidance in which married women avoided the syllables of their in-laws' names and replaced them with alternatives, often click-containing words from Khoe. The name Xhosa itself begins with a click.

03

Upheaval, Print and Constitution

In the 1820s–30s the rise of the Zulu kingdom and the wars and migrations known as the Mfecane carried Nguni languages far to the north, to Zimbabwe (Ndebele) and as far as Malawi and Tanzania (Ngoni). How this period should be described is itself disputed. Missionaries wrote down Xhosa, Sotho and Tswana from the 1820s. Robert Moffat's complete Tswana Bible appeared in 1857, and Sol Plaatje, journalist and founding member of the ANC, published a collection of Tswana proverbs (1916) and translations of Shakespeare. South Africa's 1996 constitution recognises nine Bantu languages among its official languages.

A sample

In its own words

Zulu

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu
Umuntu
person
ngumuntu
COP-person
ngabantu
through-people
‘A person is a person through other people.’
Sources (1)
  • Gade, Christian B. N. 2011. The historical development of the written discourses on ubuntu. South African Journal of Philosophy 30(3): 303–329.

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. South Africac. 49 million
  2. Zimbabwec. 13 million
  3. Botswanac. 2 million
  4. Lesothoc. 2 million
  5. Eswatinic. 1 million
  6. Mozambique

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Splitc. 200 – 1000 CEContested

    Into southern Africa

    Bantu-speaking farmers spread across southern Africa, and the Shona, Sotho-Tswana, Nguni and other southern groups begin to diverge. The routes and the order of arrival are debated.

    Sources (1)
    • Ehret, Christopher. 1998. An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
  2. Contactc. 1st – 2nd millennium CE

    Clicks from Khoe and San

    Through intermarriage, bilingualism and hlonipha avoidance speech, Xhosa, Zulu and, to a lesser degree, Southern Sotho take in click consonants from Khoe and San languages.

    Sources (1)
    • Herbert, Robert K. 1990. The sociohistory of clicks in Southern Bantu. Anthropological Linguistics 32.
  3. Split1820s – 1830sContested

    The Mfecane

    Wars and migrations around the rise of the Zulu kingdom carry Nguni languages north: Ndebele to Zimbabwe, Ngoni to Malawi and Tanzania. Historians dispute the causes and scale of the Mfecane, and even whether it should be treated as a single event.

    Sources (1)
    • Hamilton, Carolyn, ed. 1995. The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
  4. Writing1820s – 1916

    Print in Xhosa, Sotho and Tswana

    Mission presses publish grammars, scripture and newspapers. The Tswana Bible appears in 1857, and African writers such as Sol Plaatje soon use the languages for their own journalism and scholarship.

    Figures · Sol Plaatje (1876–1932)

    Sources (1)
    • Van de Velde, Mark, Koen Bostoen, Derek Nurse & Gérard Philippson, eds. 2019. The Bantu Languages, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
  5. Revitalization1996

    Official languages of South Africa

    The post-apartheid constitution gives official status to nine Bantu languages (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Ndebele, Northern and Southern Sotho, Tswana, Tsonga and Venda) alongside English and Afrikaans. In practice English still dominates public life.

    Sources (1)
    • Van de Velde, Mark, Koen Bostoen, Derek Nurse & Gérard Philippson, eds. 2019. The Bantu Languages, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.