Venda (Tshivenḓa) Alphabet

By the Unicode CLDR list, the Tshivenḓa alphabet has 28 letters: A B D Ḓ E F G H I K L Ḽ M N Ṅ Ṋ O P R S T Ṱ U V W X Y Z. C, J and Q are used only in foreign words and names. Five letters carry a mark, and each comes straight after its plain partner, so ḓ follows d, ḽ follows l, ṅ and ṋ follow n, and ṱ follows t.

Much of the spelling is done with letter pairs and groups. vh, as in Vhavenḓa (the Venda people), is a soft sound made with both lips, between v and w; fh is its breathy partner. ph, th and kh are p, t and k with a puff of air, not the English f and th; dz, tsh, ny and ng each stand for one sound, and x is the rasping sound of Scottish loch, not the English ks. That is why learners drill "words that start with dy", "kh" or "nz".

Ḓ ḽ ṋ ṱ: the dental letters

The mark that makes Venda writing recognisable at a glance is the little hat under four consonants: ḓ, ḽ, ṋ and ṱ. It is a circumflex below, and it marks a dental sound, made with the tip of the tongue against the upper front teeth. The plain letters d, l, n and t are said further back, on the ridge behind the teeth, as in English. Venda keeps the two sets apart, so the mark is part of the spelling, not decoration, and words differ by it alone.

You see the dental letters everywhere, starting with the name of the language: Tshivenḓa, Vhavenḓa, Venḓa. They are in numbers like iṋa (four) and ṱhanu (five), and in the word people use in almost every farewell, zwavhuḓi (well, nicely). ṱ is often followed by h, giving the breathy dental ṱh of ṱhanu.

Ṅ: the ng sound

ṅ, n with a dot above, stands for the sound at the end of English sing, said on its own without a following g. Venda can begin a word with it, as in ṅwana (child). The pair ng is kept for the sound of English finger, with the g heard, so the dot is what tells the two apart.

The same letter is used in the spelling of a few other languages and transliterations, and Unicode has had it, together with ḓ ḽ ṋ ṱ, in the Latin Extended Additional block since version 1.1, so every modern font family that covers that block can show Venda text.

How to type Venda letters on a computer and phone

Standard keyboards have no key for these letters and Windows has no short Alt code for them, so the easiest way on any device is to copy them from the grid above. In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 1E13 for ḓ, 1E12 Ḓ, 1E3D ḽ, 1E3C Ḽ, 1E45 ṅ, 1E44 Ṅ, 1E4B ṋ, 1E4A Ṋ, 1E71 ṱ and 1E70 Ṱ. Character Map (search "charmap" in the Start menu) finds them too.

On a Mac, add the Unicode Hex Input source in Keyboard settings, then hold Option and type the same four-character code; or open the Character Viewer with Control+Command+Space and search for "circumflex below". On a phone, look in your keyboard's language list for Venda (Tshivenḓa); Gboard offers it. In HTML, write ḓ for ḓ and the other codes the same way. If a system will not accept the ready-made letters, a plain letter followed by the combining circumflex below (U+032D) gives the same shape, but fonts place it less reliably.

In quick messages and on some signs the marks are often left off, giving Tshivenda or Venda, since not every keyboard has the letters. Dictionaries, school books, the Bible and official texts keep them. Venda is quoted with the same curly marks as English, “…” and ‘…’.

Where Venda is spoken

In South Africa's 2022 census, 2.5% of people aged one and older reported Tshivenda as the language most often spoken in their household 🇿🇦. It is one of the country's official languages, spoken mainly in the Vhembe district of northern Limpopo around Thohoyandou (Ṱhohoyanḓou, "head of the elephant"), Makhado and the Soutpansberg mountains. Some 70,000 more (71,647 named it as their mother tongue in Zimbabwe's 2022 census) live across the Limpopo River in southern Zimbabwe 🇿🇼, where Venda is one of the languages recognised by the constitution. The prefixes do the naming: the language is Tshivenḓa, the people Vhavenḓa, one person Muvenḓa, and the land Venḓa. In South Africa money is the rand, written with a capital R before the amount: R50.

Venda is a Bantu language that stands somewhat apart from its neighbours: it shares features with Shona to the north and with the Sotho-Tswana languages to the south, but belongs to neither group. In Limpopo it lives side by side with Northern Sotho (Sepedi) and Tsonga, and many speakers also know Zulu or English. See the Shona, Northern Sotho, Tsonga and Zulu collections for their letters, and the South Africa and Zimbabwe collections for each country's flag, food and other emoji. Venda music has its own voice too: drums 🪘 accompany the tshikona reed-pipe dance and the domba initiation dance.