Xhosa language

Xhosa, also called isiXhosa and once written as Xosa, is a Bantu language native to Southern Africa. It holds official status in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Roughly 8 million people speak it as their first language, with many more using it as a second tongue across South Africa—especially in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Northern Cape, and Gauteng—as well as in parts of Zimbabwe and Lesotho. The language is notable for its heavy reliance on click consonants, which appear in about 10% of its basic vocabulary, a functional load perhaps matched only by Yeyi among Bantu languages.

Linguistically, Xhosa belongs to the Nguni branch of the Bantu family, specifically the Zunda subgroup, which also includes Zulu, Southern Ndebele, and Northern Ndebele. These Zunda languages form a dialect continuum, with Xhosa being largely mutually intelligible with Zulu and, to a lesser degree, with other Nguni varieties.

Geographically, Xhosa is the most widespread African language in South Africa, though Zulu remains the most commonly spoken overall. The majority of Xhosa speakers—about 5.3 million—live in the Eastern Cape. Significant populations also reside in the Western Cape (around 1 million), Gauteng (671,045), the Free State (246,192), KwaZulu-Natal (219,826), North West (214,461), Mpumalanga (46,553), the Northern Cape (51,228), and Limpopo (14,225). Outside South Africa, roughly 200,000 Xhosa speakers live in Zimbabwe, and about 18,000 reside in Lesotho’s Quthing District.

In writing, Xhosa uses the 26 basic Latin letters, supplemented by digraphs, trigraphs, and even tetragraphs to represent certain sounds. Tone, stress, and vowel length are generally not marked in the orthography. The language has ten vowels—a, e, i, o, u—each occurring in both long and short forms. It is tonal, with two inherent phonemic tones (low and high), though these are rarely written. Long vowels are phonemic but usually not indicated, except in cases like sequences of two vowels with different tones, which produce falling or rising contour tones.

Xhosa’s consonant inventory is rich in uncommon sounds. Beyond pulmonic egressive consonants, it includes ejective stops, one implosive stop, and 15 click consonants (or 18 if prenasalized clicks are counted). For comparison, Juǀʼhoan has 48 clicks and Taa has 83. The murmured clicks, plosives, and affricates are only partially voiced, with the following vowel often murmured; they are better described as slack voiced. They become fully voiced only after nasals, and their main effect is to depress the tone of the syllable. Ejective consonants tend to be fully ejective only in careful speech; otherwise, they are often plain (tenuis) stops. Similarly, plain clicks are frequently glottalised, with a long voice onset time.

When consonants are prenasalised, their pronunciation and spelling shift. Murmur no longer transfers to the following vowel. Fricatives become affricated, and voiceless ones become ejectives—for example, *mf* is pronounced [ɱp̪fʼ], *ndl* as [ndɮ], and *n+hl* as [ntɬʼ]. The orthographic *b* in *mb* represents a voiced plosive. Prenasalisation occurs in contexts like the class 9 prefix /iN-/, as in *intle* (“beautiful”) for a class 9 noun. When aspirated clicks are prenasalised, a silent *h* is added to avoid confusion with nasal clicks, which are distinct sounds. Plain voiceless clicks become slack voiced nasal when prenasalised.

Palatalisation affects labial consonants when followed by [j]. This process is still productive, as seen in the passive suffix /-w/ and diminutive suffix /-ana/. It can skip non-local syllables but does not affect morpheme-initial consonants.