Sotho

Where it’s spoken

Sesotho (Southern Sotho) is one of the two official languages of Lesotho and one of South Africa’s eleven official languages, where it is concentrated in the Free State and parts of Gauteng. It is mutually intelligible with Northern Sotho (Sepedi) and Tswana to varying degrees — all three together are called the Sotho-Tswana group.

What it sounds like

Sesotho has two tones (high and low), seven vowels, and clicks adopted from neighboring Khoisan languages — though far fewer than Zulu or Xhosa, with click sounds limited to specific words. The verb system is complex, with extensive tense-aspect morphology and multiple negation strategies.

How it’s written

Sesotho is written in the Latin alphabet. The Lesotho and South African orthographies differ slightly — Lesotho uses an older “Lord’s Prayer” missionary spelling tradition, while South Africa modernized in the 20th century. This means “Lesotho” itself is “Lesoto” in some South African contexts.

History

French Protestant missionaries (the Paris Evangelical Mission) developed the first Sesotho writing system in the 1830s. The first Bible was translated by 1881. Modern literary Sotho began with novels and poetry in the 20th century.