South Ndebele Alphabet

South Ndebele is written with the Latin letters a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z, each in capital and small form, as in the symbol grid above. Its official orthography includes r and rh, for example in rara and rhulu. There is not a single accented letter, so a South Ndebele text can be typed on any English keyboard or phone and pasted anywhere.

The five vowels a e i o u sound roughly as in Spanish or Italian. South Ndebele is a tonal language, like Zulu and the other Nguni languages, but the standard spelling does not mark tone, so the accents and dots you see in Afrikaans, Sepedi or Tshivenḓa never appear in it.

Many sounds are written with two or three ordinary letters. hl is a voiceless lateral fricative, made by forcing air past the sides of the tongue, and dl is its voiced counterpart, as in ukudla, food. In ph, th and kh, h marks aspiration; in rh, the digraph represents /x/. ny is the ny of canyon, ng the ng of finger, and tjh is the aspirated ch sound you hear in the greeting Lotjhani. The spelling tjh is one of the things that sets written South Ndebele apart from Zulu.

Click letters: c, q and x

Like Zulu, Xhosa and Swati, South Ndebele has click consonants, and it writes them with three letters that never have their English sounds. c is the dental click, the soft tsk-tsk of disapproval made with the tongue tip behind the front teeth. q is the sharper, hollow pop of the tongue pulled down from the roof of the mouth. x is the lateral click made at the side of the tongue, the sound some riders use to urge on a horse.

Each click comes in several versions, shown by the letters written beside it: an h after it for an aspirated click (ch, qh, xh), a g before it for a voiced one (gc, gq, gx) and an n before it for a nasal one (nc, nq, nx). That is why school lists of "Ndebele words with gq" and "words with xh" exist: learners practise one click group at a time. The clicks are generally thought to have entered the Nguni languages through contact with Khoisan languages.

Typing them needs nothing special. The clicks are plain c, q and x, and the combinations are those letters next to g, h or n.

Capitals, punctuation and the rand

One spelling habit is worth knowing: when a prefix is attached to a name, the prefix stays small and the name keeps its capital in the middle of the word. So the language is isiNdebele, the people amaNdebele, "in Mpumalanga" is eMpumalanga, and the old homeland was KwaNdebele. Phone keyboards sometimes "correct" these, so check them before posting.

Punctuation uses the comma, full stop, ? and !; CLDR's South Ndebele locale data uses single curly quotes ‘ ’ as the primary pair, with double quotes “ ” nested inside them. On Windows, Alt+0145 and Alt+0146 produce ‘ ’, and Alt+0147 and Alt+0148 produce “ ” on the number pad; on a Mac, Option+] and Option+Shift+] produce ‘ ’, and Option+[ and Option+Shift+[ produce “ ”. Phones and word processors usually curl straight quotes on their own.

Money is in South African rand, which has no Unicode sign of its own and is written with a capital R before the amount: R50, R1 200. That R is in the currency row of the grid.

South Ndebele greetings and words

The everyday South Ndebele greeting is Lotjhani, hello, and it is the quickest way to tell South Ndebele from its Zimbabwean namesake, where people say Salibonani. Thank you is Ngiyathokoza, built on the verb -thokoza, to be glad, so it says roughly "I am glad". I love you is Ngiyakuthanda.

Nouns begin with a class prefix, which is why words come in families: umuntu a person, abantu people; amaNdebele the Ndebele people, isiNdebele their language. Every greeting and word here uses only plain letters, so it pastes into any message.

Where South Ndebele is spoken

South Ndebele is a language of South Africa 🇿🇦, and Unicode's CLDR estimates nearly a million speakers, about 970,000. Its heartland is Mpumalanga, the former KwaNdebele around towns such as Siyabuswa and KwaMhlanga, with many speakers in Gauteng, north-east of Pretoria, and in Limpopo. Since 1994 it has been one of South Africa's official languages, and it is taught in schools as a home language and heard on national radio.

The amaNdebele trace their history to the chief Musi, whose people lived around present-day Pretoria centuries ago, and to his sons Manala and Ndzundza, whose royal houses still lead the two main branches. Their world-famous art is the painted homestead 🎨🏠: women decorate the walls with bold geometric patterns, once in earth pigments and now in bright paints, and make the beadwork 📿 worn at weddings, initiations and on Heritage Day.

South Ndebele is a Nguni language, a close relative of Zulu, Swati and Xhosa, with words borrowed from its Sotho neighbours. North Ndebele, spoken in Zimbabwe, shares the name but has its own history and is closer to Zulu. Each of these languages has a collection here, as do Northern Sotho, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Afrikaans and the South Africa page with its flag and emoji.