IsiNdebele

Abstract

IsiNdebele is a scantily resourced language of the Bantu group spoken in Zimbabwe. The etymology of the name of the language is steeped in both myth and certain historical language contact situations. It is in this sense that while the history of the Ndebele people is argued to a short one, the language has a long and illustrious history that is traceable to isiZulu spoken in the present-day KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. It is acknowledged that the emergence of isiNdebele as a written form came through the agency of the Christian missionaries, who remarkably chose to orthographically represent isiNdebele differently and independently from isiZulu, which had earlier been committed to writing. The linguistic proximity between the two languages has inadvertently affected the literary growth of isiNdebele in particular, which has seen an overreliance on critical isiZulu literature in the Zimbabwean education system. Consequentially, it was only at the beginning of the millennium that we saw a significant development in the growth of the isiNdebele language in terms of the creation of an isiNdebele corpus, the publication of a first monolingual dictionary Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele (2001), which was quickly followed by a dictionary of musical terms Isichazamazwi Sezomculo (2006), and two grammar books.

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