Zulu language

Zulu, also called isiZulu, is a language spoken by many people in Southern Africa. Most speakers live in KwaZulu-Natal, a province in South Africa.

Zulu is very important in South Africa. It is the most widely spoken home language there. Many people can understand it, too.

In 1994, Zulu became one of South Africa's official languages. It is part of a group called the Bantu languages, just like Swahili. Zulu uses the Latin alphabet, the same one used for English.

Zulu belongs to a language family called the Nguni branch, which is part of the larger Southern Bantu languages. This makes Zulu a key part of South Africa's culture and history.

Geographical distribution

The Zulu language is spoken by many people who have moved to nearby areas, especially Zimbabwe. There, the Northern Ndebele language (isiNdebele) is very similar to Zulu.

Another language, Xhosa, is mainly spoken in the Eastern Cape. Zulu speakers can often understand it, just like the Northern Ndebele language.

History

The Zulu people have lived in South Africa for many years. Their language, Zulu, has special sounds called clicks. These clicks are common in Southern Africa but not found elsewhere.

For a long time, Zulu was not a written language. This changed when European missionaries arrived and began writing it down using the Latin alphabet. The first grammar book for Zulu was published in Norway in 1850. The first Bible in Zulu appeared in 1883. Later, Zulu writers began creating books in their own language, with the first novel appearing in 1930. Today, Zulu is one of the official languages of South Africa.

Contemporary usage

Before 1994, South African governments mainly used English and Afrikaans. In the Kwazulu area, many people still used the Zulu language. After 1994, the Zulu language became more popular. Television stations began showing news and shows in Zulu, and many people enjoy listening to Zulu radio. You can find Zulu newspapers like isoLezwe, Ilanga, and UmAfika in Kwazulu-Natal and Johannesburg. In 2005, the first full-length movie made entirely in Zulu, called Yesterday, was nominated for an Oscar.

The famous movie The Lion King used some Zulu words in the song "Circle of Life." The hymn Siyahamba was originally written in Zulu and became popular in churches. The 2019 song Jerusalema also includes Zulu lyrics.

Standard vs Urban Zulu

The Zulu language taught in schools, called "deep Zulu," is different from the Zulu spoken in cities, called Urban Zulu. School Zulu uses only Zulu words. But people in cities often mix in many words from English. This difference can make it hard for young students to understand the Zulu they learn in school.

Phonology

Vowels

Zulu has five vowels.

/ɛ/ and /ɔ/ sound like [e] and [o] when the next syllable has [+ATR] vowels /i/ or /u/. Otherwise, they sound like [ɛ] and [ɔ].

• umgibeli "passenger", sounds like [úm̩̀ɡìɓé(ː)lì]
• ukupheka "to cook", sounds like [ùɠúpʰɛ̀(ː)ɠà]

Zulu has a little bit of vowel length. This happens when some syllables come together. For example, the word ithambo /íːtʰámbó/ "bone" comes from an older form ilithambo /ílítʰámbó/. Another example is uphahla /úːpʰaɬa/ "roof" from uluphahla /ulúpʰaɬa/. The vowel in the middle of a word can sometimes be longer when the word is at the end of a sentence.

Consonants

1. The quiet sounds like [pʼ], [tʼ], [kʼ], [tsʼ], [tʃʼ] and [kxʼ].
2. When there is no nasal sound before /ɠ/, it often appears with /k/ and /kʰ/. /k/ and /kʰ/ are usually at the start of words, while /ɠ/ is in the middle. New words from other languages can have /k/ and /kʰ/ in other places, like isekhondi /iːsekʰoːndi/ "second" and ibhayisikili /iːbajisikiːli/ "bicycle".
3. The slack-voiced consonants are depressor consonants. They lower the tone of the syllable they are in.
4. The consonant /ŋ/ appears in some dialects as a change of the cluster /nɡ/ when it is not at the start of a word stem, and is always slack-voiced.
5. The trill /r/ is not part of Zulu and only appears in expressive words and recent borrowings from European languages.

The use of click consonants is one of the most special parts of Zulu. This feature is shared with some other languages in Southern Africa, but it is rare elsewhere. There are three basic click sounds in Zulu:

• Denti-alveolar /ǀ/, like the sound you make when you say 'tsk tsk'.
• Postalveolar /!/, like the pop of a bottle top.
• Lateral /ǁ/, like a click you might use to get a horse to walk.

Each of these sounds has five different forms, for a total of 15.

Phonotactics

Zulu words usually follow the pattern (N)C(w)V, and must always end in a vowel. Consonant clusters can have any consonant, sometimes with a homorganic nasal consonant before it (called "prenasalisation") and sometimes with the consonant /w/ after it.

The sound /m̩/ can act like a syllable by itself. It can appear even when not at the start of a word and can carry tones like a full syllable. It does not have to match the sound of the next consonant, though usually it does. For example, umpetshisi /um̩pétʃiːsi/ "peach tree" has 5 syllables and impoko /ímpoːɠo/ "grass flower" has 3 syllables. Sequences of syllabic m and the same m can also happen, like in ummbila /úm̩mbíːla/ "maize" with 4 syllables.

New words from languages like English can break these rules, having extra consonant clusters not normal in Zulu, like in igremu /iːgreːmu/ "gram". Speakers may sometimes add a vowel to make these easier to say, like saying ikhompiyutha /iːkʰompijuːtʰa/ or ikhompyutha /iːkʰompjuːtʰa/ for "computer".

Prosody

Stress

Stress in Zulu usually falls on the second-to-last syllable of a word. This is often marked by making the vowel a little longer. If the last vowel of a word is long because of contraction, it gets the stress instead.

Lengthening only happens in words that are at the end of a sentence or phrase. So, for words with at least two syllables, there are two forms, one with the stress on the second-to-last syllable and one without it. In some cases, the position of the word can change its meaning. Some words, like ideophones or interjections, do not follow this regular stress pattern.

Tone

Like many Bantu and other African languages, Zulu is tonal. There are three main tones: low, high and falling. Zulu is written without showing tone, but tone can change the meaning of a word. For example, "priest" and "teacher" are both written umfundisi, but are said with different tones: /úm̩fúndisi/ for "priest" and /úm̩fundísi/ for "teacher".

Usually, every syllable can have a high or low tone. However, low tone is more like the default and does not behave the same as high or falling tones. High tones can spread to low-toned syllables, but not the other way around. A low tone is simply the absence of a specific tone. The falling tone is a mix of high and low and only happens on long vowels. The second-to-last syllable can have a falling tone when it is long because of the word's place in the sentence. But when it shortens, the falling tone is not allowed there.^{[clarification needed]}

Every morpheme has its own tone pattern, but Zulu has word tone, meaning the tones act as a template for assigning tones to syllables. This makes the relationship between the underlying tone patterns and the actual spoken tones complex. High tones often appear to the right of where they originally were, especially in longer words.

Depressor consonants

The breathy consonant sounds in Zulu are depressor consonants. They lower the pitch of the syllable they are in. In syllables with these consonants, high tones sound rising, and falling tones sound rising-then-falling. The pitch does not get as high as in syllables without these consonants. These consonants do not change a syllable that is already low, but they stop a high tone from spreading to the next syllable.

Phonological processes

Prenasalisation

Prenasalisation happens when a consonant is preceded by a nasal sound that matches it, either naturally or because of adding prefixes. The most common example is the class 9 noun prefix in-, which ends in a nasal sound. This changes the following consonant in several ways, some of which are important for meaning and others which are just sound changes.

Tone assimilation

Zulu has tonic assimilation: high tones tend to spread to following low-tone syllables, making their pitch a little higher. A syllable with no tone between two high-tone syllables takes on a high tone as well. If a high-tone syllable is followed by a syllable with no tone, the middle syllable gets a high tone from the first syllable, making a falling tone.

For example, the English word spoon became isipunu in Zulu, phonemically /ísipúnu/. The second syllable si takes on some of the high tone, so it is said as [ísípʼúːnù] at the end of a sentence. If we show pitch with numbers, with 1 being the highest pitch and 9 the lowest, the syllables have pitches 2-4-3-9. The second syllable is still lower than the ones next to it.

Tone displacement

Depressor consonants can cause tone displacement. This happens when a depressor and a high tone appear together, and the tone moves to the next syllable. If the next syllable is long, it gets a falling tone; if it is short, it gets a high tone. If the next syllable is short and at the end of the word, the tone may change to low. Tone displacement does not happen under these conditions:

• When the syllable has a long vowel.
• When the next syllable also has a depressor consonant.
• When the next syllable is the last syllable and is short.

When tone displacement does not happen, the depressor syllable keeps its high tone with the low-tone start as described above. If the next syllable already has a high or falling tone, the tone seems to disappear from the first syllable without changing the next syllable's tone.

Some examples:

• izipunu "spoons", the plural of isipunu, is phonemically /ízipúnu/. Because /z/ is a depressor consonant, tone assimilation does not happen. The word is said as [ízìpʼúːnù] at the end of a sentence, with a low tone in the second syllable.
• izintombi "girls" is phonemically /izíntombí/. /z/ is a depressor, and tone displacement is not blocked, so the tone moves to the third syllable. This syllable can be long or short depending on the sentence. When long, it sounds like [ìzìntômbí], with a falling tone. When short, the tone is high, and the last syllable changes to low, sounding like [ìzìntómbì].
• nendoda "with a man" is phonemically /nʱéndoda/. Both /nʱ/ and /d/ are depressors, so tone displacement is blocked. The word sounds like [nʱěndɔ̀ːdà], with a rising pitch in the first syllable because of the low-onset effect.

Palatalization

Palatalization changes labial and alveolar consonants when they come before /j/. While this change happened in the past, it still happens today when adding suffixes that start with /j/. A common example is the diminutive suffix -yana.

Zulu usually does not allow a labial consonant to be followed by /w/. When /w/ comes after a labial consonant, it changes to /j/, which then causes palatalization of the consonant. This can be seen in the locative forms of nouns ending in -o or -u, which change to -weni and -wini in the locative form. If a labial consonant comes before, palatalization happens. This change also occurs in nouns starting with ubu- followed by a vowel stem.

The following changes happen because of palatalization:

Orthography

Zulu is mostly written with the same letters we use every day, called the Latin alphabet. Sometimes it uses a special writing style called Ditema syllabics. In some places, like Malawi, a different script called Mwangwego might be used for a version of Zulu called Ngoni.

Zulu uses the same 26 basic letters as English, but they can sound different. Sometimes, Zulu uses two letters together to make a special sound. It doesn’t use special marks to show how loud or long a sound is.

Older books might have used extra letters or special ways to write sounds, but most modern writing is simple. When writing names or words that start with vowels, Zulu sometimes puts a hyphen between parts to make it clearer, like in i-Afrika.

Morphology

Main article: Zulu grammar

Zulu has special ways of building words and putting them together. One way is to put the subject, then the verb, and finally the object in that order. Zulu nouns are grouped into different classes, and words that describe these nouns must match the class of the noun.

Verbs in Zulu also have different forms to show when something happens and whether it is ongoing or finished. Words can be changed by adding pieces to the beginning or end.

The root word for "Zulu" can be combined with other pieces to make new words. Here is a table showing some examples:

Sample phrases and text

Here are some phrases you might hear or use if you visit a place where people speak Zulu.

This is a part of the beginning of the Constitution of South Africa:

Translation:

Counting in Zulu

In Zulu, people count using their fingers. They start with the little finger on the left hand and move to the left thumb. Then they use the right-hand thumb and go to the right little finger. Each finger is raised as they count from one to five on the left hand, and then they do the same on the right hand.

The words for numbers six to nine in Zulu describe the finger or the action, like "thumb" for six, or the position, like "two remaining" for eight.

Months

Months in Zulu

Oral literature

Zulu has many proverbs, tales, riddles, and songs that families have shared for many years.

Proverbs

In 1912, a missionary named Franz Mayr collected 150 Zulu proverbs and shared them with English translations. Some proverbs teach us to wait and hear all sides before making a judgment. Others tell us that everyone looks after their own needs.

Tales

In 1868, Henry Callaway collected traditional Zulu stories. These stories include adventures of a famous trickster, tales of heroes and their families, and legends about magical birds. Many stories have strong and clever women as the main characters.

Riddles

Callaway also collected Zulu riddles. These riddles make people think and solve puzzles, such as guessing what animal can be in two places at the same time or what always stands but never sits.

Songs

In 1920, someone named Madikane Čele shared Zulu songs in a book. These songs include war songs, lullabies, dance songs, and love songs, with the original Zulu words and their English meanings.

John Colenso

[Zulu-English Dictionary]

Henry Callaway

Colony of Natal

Zulu trickster figure

honeyguide

Natalie Curtis Burlin

[Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent]

Zulu words in South African English

South African English uses many words from the Zulu language. Some of these words are now used in everyday English, like the names of animals such as impala and mamba. Here are a few examples of Zulu words you might hear:

• muti (from umuthi) – medicine
• donga (from udonga) – ditch
• indaba – conference
• induna – leader
• shongololo (from ishongololo) – millipede
• ubuntu – kindness.