Tswana language

Tswana, also called Setswana, is a Bantu language from Southern Africa. About 8.2 million people speak it. It is related to languages like Sepedi and Sesotho.

Tswana is an official language in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Many people speak it in Botswana and parts of South Africa, such as the North West Province. In Pretoria, people often use a version called Sepitori. Some Tswana speakers also live in Namibia.

History

The first European to describe the Tswana language was a German traveler named Hinrich Lichtenstein. He lived among a Batswana tribe called the Batlhaping in 1806, but his work was not published until 1930. He thought Tswana was a dialect of the isiXhosa language.

The first major work on Tswana was done by a British missionary, Robert Moffat. He also lived among the Batlhaping and published books such as Bechuana Spelling Book and A Bechuana Catechism in 1826. Over the years, he published several books of the Bible, and in 1857, he finished translating the whole Bible.

The first grammar of Tswana was published in 1833 by a missionary named James Archbell, but it was based on isiXhosa grammar. Later, in 1841, a French missionary named E. Casalis published a grammar that saw Tswana as a separate language from isiXhosa, though he still thought it was similar to Sepedi and Sesotho.

Solomon Plaatje, a South African intellectual and linguist, was one of the first writers to write a lot about the Tswana language.

Phonology

Vowels

The vowels in the Tswana language are shown below.

Some dialects have two extra vowels, /e/ and /o/. The special marks on e and o are only used in early school levels and not in higher grades; usually these are written without the marks.

Consonants

The consonants in the Tswana language are shown below.

The consonant [d] is a variation of /l/ when it comes before the vowels /i/ or /u/. Two more sounds, v /v/ and z /z/, are only found in words borrowed from other languages.

Tswana also has three special sounds called click consonants, but these are only used in expressions or sounds made by older people, and are therefore not used as much anymore. The three click consonants are the dental click /ǀ/, written ⟨c⟩; the lateral click /ǁ/, written ⟨x⟩; and the alveolar click /ǃ/, written ⟨q⟩.

All nasal and liquid sounds can be used as syllabic consonants, which often appear together in pairs of sounds. Syllabic consonants only appear at the beginning or middle of words, except for /ŋ/, which can also appear at the end of a word (as in Jwaneng and Barolong Seboni).

There are some small differences in the consonants among speakers of Tswana.

Stress

Stress in Tswana always falls on the second-to-last part of a word, although some combined words may have a smaller stress on the first part of the word. The part of the word that gets the stress is said longer. Thus, mosadi (woman) is said as [mʊ̀ˈsáːdì].

Tone

Tswana has two tones, high and low, but the low tone is used more often in words than the high tone. Tones are not written down.

go bua /χʊ búa/ "to speak"

go bua /χʊ bua/ "to skin an animal"

o bua Setswana /ʊ́búa setswána/ "He speaks Setswana"

ke bua Setswana /ʊbúa setswána/ "You speak Setswana"

An important feature of the tones is the spreading of the high tone. If a part of a word has a high tone, the next two parts of the word will also have high tones unless they are at the end of the word.

simolola /símʊlʊla/ > /símʊ́lʊ́la/ "to begin"

simologêla /símʊlʊχɛla/ > /símʊ́lʊ́χɛla/ "to begin for/at"

Orthography

Setswana uses the Latin alphabet for writing.

The letter š was added in 1937, but some people still write this sound as ⟨sh⟩. The letters ⟨ê⟩ and ⟨ô⟩ are seen in textbooks, but they are not used often in everyday writing.

Grammar

Nouns

In the Tswana language, nouns are put into nine special groups called noun classes and one smaller group. Each group has different beginning words called prefixes. You can see these nine classes and their prefixes in the table below, along with some notes about what nouns usually share in each group.

Some nouns can belong to more than one group. For example, many nouns from the first group can also be found in the first small group, as well as in the third, fourth, and fifth groups.