Zulu, South Africa's most common home language, only got written down in the 1800s
About 13.56 million people speak Zulu as a first language, and over half of South Africans understand it. Yet its first grammar was printed in Norway, its click sounds are unknown elsewhere in Africa, and schoolchildren today sometimes struggle with the purist standard version they are taught.
Zulu, which its speakers call isiZulu, belongs to the Nguni group of Southern Bantu languages and is centred on the province of KwaZulu-Natal. It is the home language of 24 per cent of South Africans, and Ethnologue ranks it second among Bantu languages after Swahili. Speakers of Xhosa, the main language of the Eastern Cape, can often follow Zulu, and so can those of Northern Ndebele, spoken in Zimbabwe, where Zulu migrants carried the language. Like other Nguni tongues it has click consonants typical of Southern Africa, a legacy of long coexistence with the San and Khoi.
Writing arrived with European missionaries using the Latin alphabet. The Norwegian Hans Schreuder published the first Zulu grammar in 1850, a Bible translation followed in 1883, and in 1901 John Dube, a Zulu from Natal, founded the Ohlange Institute. Before 1994, South African governments used only English and Afrikaans, and secondary schooling was in those languages, though Zulu was widely used in the KwaZulu bantustan. The SABC did start Zulu television in the early 1980s.
The end of apartheid in 1994 made Zulu one of the country's official languages and set off a revival. Its reach extends into global pop culture: the Circle of Life chant in the 1994 film The Lion King includes the Zulu line meaning here is the king, my people; the hymn Siyahamba spread through North American churches in the 1990s; and the remix of the 2019 hit Jerusalema has Zulu lyrics.
A gap has opened between two registers. Standard or deep Zulu, taught in schools, coins new terms from Zulu roots, while Urban Zulu in the cities borrows freely, mostly from English, and young people often find the school form hard to follow. The sound system has five vowels, limited vowel length created when syllables contracted, as when an older ilithambo shrank to ithambo, meaning bone, and plain voiceless consonants pronounced as ejectives.
Source: Zulu language
