Zulu

Where it’s spoken

Zulu (isiZulu) is one of 11 official languages of South Africa and is the country’s most spoken first language. It is concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces. It is mutually intelligible with Xhosa, Swati, and Ndebele — together forming the Nguni subgroup. Speaker populations also live in Eswatini, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique.

What it sounds like

Zulu features three click consonants — dental (c), lateral (x), and palatal (q) — adopted from neighboring Khoisan languages. Each click can also appear as aspirated, voiced, and nasalized variants, yielding fifteen distinct click sounds. Zulu has two contrastive tones (high and low) and a fifteen-class noun system with concordant prefixes.

How it’s written

Zulu uses the Latin alphabet. Spelling is largely phonemic, with the letters c, q, and x representing clicks. Tone is not marked. Compound noun and verb structures yield long-looking words formed from many morphemes.

History

The Zulu nation emerged under Shaka Zulu in the early 19th century. Missionary work in the 1840s produced the first written Zulu grammars and Bible translations. Modern literature, broadcasting, and pop music have entrenched it as a national language.