Zulu
isiZulu
Spoken in	South Africa  Zimbabwe  Lesotho  Malawi  Mozambique  Swaziland
Region	KwaZulu-Natal eastern Gauteng eastern Free State southern Mpumalanga
Native speakers	10.3 million  (2006) Total: 26 million
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	99-AUT-fg incl. varieties 99-AUT-fga to 99-AUT-fge
300px Proportion of the South African population that speaks isiZulu at home   0–20%   20–40%   40–60%   60–80%   80–100%
This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Zulu (isiZulu in Zulu) 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.

According to Ethnologue,^[1] it is the second most widely spoken Bantu language after Shona. Like many other Bantu languages, it is written using the Latin alphabet. The Zulu language, like other Nguni languages, is heavily influenced by the Xhosa language.

Geographical distribution[link]

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[link]

The Zulu, like Xhosa and other Nguni people, have lived in South Africa for a long time. The Zulu language possesses several click sounds typical of Southern African languages. These click sounds are not found in the rest of Africa. The Nguni people have lived together with other Southern tribes like the San and Khoi.

Zulu, like all indigenous Southern African languages, was an oral language until contact with missionaries from Europe, who documented the language using the Latin script. The first grammar book of the Zulu language was published in Norway in 1850 by the Norwegian missionary Hans Schreuder.^[2] 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, which promotes the use of all eleven official languages of South Africa.

Contemporary usage[link]

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 Siyonqoba (English: We will conquer) were used. In some movie songs, like "This Land", the voice says Busa leli zwe bo (Rule this land) and Busa ngothando bo (Rule with love) were used too.

Standard vs urban Zulu[link]

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.^[3]

Phonetics[link]

This section requires expansion.

Vowels[link]

Vowels are lengthened in the penultimate syllable.

Consonants[link]

The consonants marked with a diaeresis are depressor consonants, which affect the tone of their syllable. (See below.)

Click consonants[link]

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 articulations of clicks in Zulu:

• c: dental (comparable to a sucking of teeth, as the sound one makes for 'tsk tsk')
• q: alveolar (comparable to a bottle top 'pop')
• x: lateral (comparable to a click one may do for a walking horse)

Each articulation covers five click consonants, with differences such as being voiced, aspirated, or nasalised, for a total of 15. The /ᶢǃʱ/ and /ᵑǃʱ/ series are depressor consonants, whereas /ǃ ǃʰ ᵑǃ/ are not. An additional series occurs in Xhosa, where clicks are used more frequently than in Zulu.

[edit] 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 words for priest and teacher are both spelled umfundisi, but they are pronounced with different tones.

Zulu syllables may have high, low, or falling tones. However, low tone is the default, and is overridden by neighboring high tones, so it is common to describe low-tone syllables as having no inherent tone, with the two phonemic tones, high and falling, appearing on only certain syllables, rather like stress in English. The falling tone is actually a sequence of high–low, and only occurs on long vowels. Like other Bantu languages, Zulu has word tone, where tone patterns are largely independent of the number of syllables in a word. Zulu nouns have four principal tone patterns, while verbs have two.

Zulu is also known for having depressor consonants, which lower a high tone in their syllable. For example, the verbs ukuhlala "to live" and ukudlala "to play" both have a high tone on the prefix uku, which would normally cause the following syllable to have a high tone as well. However, the tone on the dla of ukudlala is low as a result of the depressor consonant dl. The depressor consonants are conventionally transcribed as breathy voiced, in this case /ɮ̤a/ or /ɮʱa/. However, phonetically it is the vowel which is breathy voiced, [ɮà̤], and indeed vowels may be breathy voiced without a depressor consonant. The most salient difference between the slightly implosive consonants /ɓ, ɠ/ and the plosive depressor consonants /b, ɡ/ is this effect on tone.

Zulu has tonic assimilation, where high tones tend to spread to following toneless (low-tone) syllables. Specifically, a toneless syllable between a high-tone syllable and another tonic syllable assimilates to that high tone. That is, if the preceding syllable ends on a high tone, and the following syllable begins with a high tone (whether because it's high or high–low / falling), the intermediate toneless syllable is pronounced with a high tone as well. When the preceding syllable is high but the following is toneless, then the medial toneless syllable adopts a high-tone onset from the preceding syllable, resulting in a phonetic falling (high–low) tone.

In syllables with depressor consonants, however, high tones are realized as rising, and falling tones as rising-falling; in neither case do they reach as high as in non-depressed syllables. That is, depressor consonants add a low-tone onset to the inherent tone of the syllable; the possible tones on a syllable with a voiceless consonant like hla are [ɬá ɬâ ɬà], while the possible tones of a depressor-consonant syllable like dla are [ɮǎ̤ ɮa̤᷈ ɮà̤]. If there is no inherent tone in the syllable, a depressor consonant blocks assimilation to a preceding high tone, keeping the tone low.

For example, the English word 'spoon' was borrowed into Zulu as isipunu. The initial 's' was reanalyzed as the singular prefix isi-, which has a high tone. The English stress on the 'oo' vowel was interpreted as a high tone, as normally happens with English loans. Thus the Zulu word isipunu is phonemically /ísipúnu/, and phonetically [ísípʼúːnù] (high-tone spread to si, and low tone on the unmarked final syllable). The plural prefix for isi- nouns, however, is izi-, and Zulu z is a depressor consonant. Thus the plural /ízipúnu/ 'spoons' is pronounced [ízì̤pʼúːnù], with no tone assimilation. (In both cases, the high tone of pu is slightly lower than the tone of i, due to tonic downdrift. The penultimate syllable is also lengthened, as is normal in Zulu.)

Another example are the pair of words abantwana 'children' and amadada 'ducks'. /aɓántwaːna/ is pronounced [aɓántwâːnà], with a long falling tone on the penult. D, however, is a depressor consonant, so /amádada/ is pronounced [amádà̤ːdà̤], with a long low tone on the penult.^[4]

Grammar[link]

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[link]

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

Sample text[link]

(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[link]

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 (Xhosa: 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[link]

The Zulu language is referred to as 'isiZulu' in Zulu, 'isi-' being the gender (or noun class) prefix associated with languages. For example, isiNgisi = English, isiXhosa = Xhosa, isiBhunu = Afrikaans, isiJalimane = German, etc. Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that 'isi-' does not itself mean 'language'. Rather, the characteristic use of the 'isi-' noun class with languages can be compared to the use of the feminine gender in Romance languages to refer to fruits, while the masculine gender of the same word indicates the corresponding fruit tree. Hence, while in Spanish, manzana means 'apple', the masculine manzano means 'apple tree'. Thus the gender prefix 'isi-' in Zulu no more means 'language' than the gender suffix '-o' in Spanish means 'tree'.

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[link]

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[link]

• 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[link]

• Bantu language
• Nguni culture
• Shaka kaSenzangakhona
• Tsotsitaal – a Zulu-based creole language spoken in Soweto
• UCLA Language Materials Project
• Zulu people

Sources[link]

• UCLA Language Materials Project – Zulu

References[link]

External links[link]

Zulu language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Zulu

• Zulu language at Ethnologue (16th ed., 2009)
• Zulu in the World Atlas of Language Structures Online
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Zulu
• Zulu phrasebook on Wikitravel
• South African Languages: IsiZulu
• A short English–isiZulu–Japanese phraselist incl. sound file
• Zulu Swadesh list of basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)

Grammars[link]

• Sifunda isiZulu!
• Zulu Grammar with Audio!
• University Of South Africa, free online course

Dictionaries[link]

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

Newspapers[link]

• Isolezwe
• Ilanga
• UmAfrika
• Izindaba News24

Software[link]

• 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[link]

• KwaZulu-Natal Literary Map

v t e Languages of Lesotho Official English Sesotho (national language) Non-official Phuthi Xhosa Zulu

v t e Languages of South Africa Official West Germanic Afrikaans English Southern Bantu Sotho-Tswana Northern Sotho (Sepedi) Sesotho Tswana (Setswana) Nguni Southern Ndebele (isiNdebele) Swazi (siSwati) Xhosa (isiXhosa) Zulu (isiZulu) Venda (Tshivenda) Tsonga (Xitsonga) PanSALB1 Khoi Nama San SASL German Greek Gujarati Hindi Portuguese Tamil Telegu Urdu Arabic Hebrew Sanskrit 1 unofficial languages mentioned in the 1996 constitution

v t e Languages of Swaziland Official English Swazi (Swati) Non-official Afrikaans Tsonga Zulu Immigrant Chewa (Nyanja) Shimaore Sotho (Sesotho)