Zulu language
Zulu, or isiZulu as an endonym, is a Southern Bantu language of the Nguni branch spoken in, and indigenous to, Southern Africa with about 13.56 million native speakers, who primarily inhabit the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. The word "KwaZulu-Natal" translates into English as "Home of the Zulu Nation is Natal". Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa, and it is understood by over 50% of its population. It became one of South Africa's 12 official languages in 1994.
According to Ethnologue, it is the second-most widely spoken of the Bantu languages, after Swahili. Like many other Bantu languages, it is written with the Latin alphabet.
In South African English, the language is often referred to in its native form, isiZulu.
Geographical distribution
Zulu migrant populations have taken it to adjacent regions, especially Zimbabwe, where the Northern Ndebele language is closely related to Zulu.Xhosa, the predominant language in the Eastern Cape, is often considered mutually intelligible with Zulu, as is Northern Ndebele.
Maho lists four dialects: central KwaZulu-Natal Zulu, northern Transvaal Zulu, eastern coastal Qwabe, and western coastal Cele.
History
Like Xhosa and other Nguni people, the Zulu have lived in South Africa for hundreds of years. The Zulu language possesses several click sounds typical of Southern African languages, which are not found in the rest of Africa. The Nguni people have coexisted with other Southern tribes like the San and Khoi.Zulu, like most indigenous Southern African languages, was not a written language until the arrival of European missionaries, 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. The first written document in Zulu was a Bible translation that appeared in 1883. In 1901, John Dube, 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 Zulu. Another pioneering Zulu writer was Reginald Dhlomo, author of several historical novels of the 19th-century leaders of the Zulu nation: U-Dingane, U-Shaka, U-Mpande, U-Cetshwayo and U-Dinizulu. 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
English and Afrikaans were the only official languages used by 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 fall 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 in Kwazulu-Natal province and Johannesburg. In January 2005 the first full-length feature film in Zulu, Yesterday, was nominated for an Oscar.In the 1994 film The Lion King, in the "Circle of Life" song, the phrases Ingonyama nengw' enamabala, Nans' ingonyama bakithi Baba and Siyonqoba was used. In some movie songs, like "This Land", the voice says Busa leli zwe bo and Busa ngothando bo were used too.
The song Siyahamba is a South African hymn originally written in the Zulu language that became popular in North American churches in the 1990s.
The remix of the 2019 song Jerusalema contains lyrics in Zulu.
Standard vs Urban Zulu
Zulu as it is taught in schools, also called "deep Zulu", differs in various respects from the language spoken by people living in cities. 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:| Standard Zulu | Urban Zulu | English |
| umakhalekhukhwini | iselula | mobile phone |
| Ngiyezwa | Ngiya-andastenda | I understand |
This situation has led to problems in education because standard Zulu is often not understood by young people.
Phonology
Vowels
The vowel system of Zulu consists of five vowels.| Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | |||
| Mid | |||
| Open |
and are pronounced and , respectively, if the following syllable contains the vowels or. They are and otherwise:
- umgibeli "passenger", phonetically
- ukupheka "to cook", phonetically
Consonants
- The plain voiceless plosives, affricates and clicks are realised phonetically as ejectives,,,, .
- When not preceded by a nasal, is almost in complementary distribution with and. The latter two phonemes occur almost exclusively root-initially, while appears exclusively medially. Recent loanwords contain and in other positions, e.g. isekhondi "second", ibhayisikili "bicycle".
- The slack-voiced consonants are depressor consonants. These have a lowering effect on the tone of their syllable.
- The consonant occurs in some dialects as a reduction of the cluster when it is not in stem-initial position, and is therefore always slack-voiced.
- The trill is not native to Zulu and occurs only in expressive words and in recent borrowings from European languages.
- Denti-alveolar, comparable to a sucking of teeth, as the sound one makes for 'tsk tsk'.
- Postalveolar, comparable to a bottle top 'pop'.
- Lateral, comparable to a click that one may do for a walking horse.
Phonotactics
Zulu syllables are canonically CV, and words must always end in a vowel. Consonant clusters consist of any consonant, optionally preceded by a homorganic nasal consonant and optionally followed by the consonant.In addition, syllabic occurs as a reduction of former, and acts like a true syllable: it can be syllabic even when not word-initial, and can also carry distinctive tones like a full syllable. It does not necessarily have to be homorganic with the following consonant, although the difference between homorganic nonsyllabic and syllabic is distinctive, e.g. umpetshisi "peach tree" versus impoko "grass flower". Moreover, sequences of syllabic m and homorganic m can occur, e.g. ummbila "maize".
Recent loanwords from languages such as English may violate these constraints, by including additional consonant clusters that are not native to Zulu, such as in igremu "gram". There may be some variation between speakers as to whether clusters are broken up by an epenthetic vowel or not, e.g. ikhompiyutha or ikhompyutha "computer".
Prosody
Stress
Stress in Zulu words is mostly predictable and normally falls on the penultimate syllable of a word. It is accompanied by an allophonic lengthening of the vowel. When the final vowel of a word is long due to contraction, it receives the stress instead of the preceding syllable.Lengthening does not occur on all words in a sentence, however, but only those that are sentence- or phrase-final. Thus, for any word of at least two syllables, there are two different forms, one with penultimate length and one without it, occurring in complementary distribution. In some cases, there are morphemic alternations that occur as a result of word position as well. The remote demonstrative pronouns may appear with the suffix -ana when sentence-final, but only as -ā otherwise. Likewise, the recent past tense of verbs ends in -ile sentence-finally, but is reduced to -ē medially. Moreover, a falling tone can only occur on a long vowel, so the shortening has effects on tone as well.
Some words, such as ideophones or interjections, can have stress that deviates from the regular pattern.
Tone
Like almost all other Bantu and other African languages, Zulu is tonal. There are three main tonemes: low, high and falling. Zulu is conventionally written without any indication of tone, but tone can be distinctive in Zulu. For example, the words "priest" and "teacher" are both spelt umfundisi, but they are pronounced with different tones: for the "priest" meaning, and for the "teacher" meaning.In principle, every syllable can be pronounced with either a high or a low tone. However, low tone does not behave the same as the other two, as high tones can "spread" into low-toned syllables while the reverse does not occur. A low tone is therefore better described as the absence of any toneme; it is a kind of default tone that is overridden by high or falling tones. The falling tone is a sequence of high-low and occurs only on long vowels. The penultimate syllable can also bear a falling tone when it is long due to the word's position in the phrase. However, when it shortens, the falling tone becomes disallowed in that position.
In principle, every morpheme has an inherent underlying tone pattern which does not change regardless of where it appears in a word. However, like most other Bantu languages, Zulu has word tone, meaning that the pattern of tones acts more like a template to assign tones to individual syllables, rather than a direct representation of the pronounced tones themselves. Consequently, the relationship between underlying tone patterns and the tones that are pronounced can be quite complex. Underlying high tones tend to surface rightward from the syllables where they are underlyingly present, especially in longer words.