Zulu Newspaper Reader - Dunwoody Press

INTRODUCTION
Zulu, known as isiZulu by its speakers, who call themselves
amaZulu (sg. umZulu), is one of South Africa’s eleven official
languages. It is dominant in the province KwaZulu-Natal, where
there are over 7,500,000 speakers of the language. Overall in South
Africa, with over 10 million speakers, it is the language with the
largest number of speakers, constituting 23.8% of the population.
It is to a large extent mutually understandable with Xhosa (found
mainly in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces), and Swati
(found mainly in the Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces – as well
as being the major language of neighboring Swaziland), and with
Zimbabwean Ndebele, which is one of the two major languages of
that country. These four languages, with several minor dialects,
make up the language cluster known as Nguni. The combined total
of speakers of the Nguni languages in South Africa number some 20
million representing ±45% of the population.
Zulu is a member of the large Bantu family of ±600 languages which
are spoken south of the so-called ‘Bantu line,’ which runs from
Nigeria, across the Central African Republic, the Democratic
Republic of Congo, Uganda and Kenya to southern Somalia. Not all
languages spoken south of this line are Bantu or even related to
Bantu. North of this line a large number of languages are spoken,
which are related to Bantu, in many cases very distantly, and which,
together with Bantu, constitute the Niger-Congo language family.
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