Sesotho/ Sotho/ Sutu/ Sesutu

Official Language: Lesotho
Home Speakers: South Africa

Background
It has over 4 million speakers and belongs to the Benue-Congo family, Bantu group, Sotho subgroup. Southern Sotho is largely inherently intelligible with Pedi (Northern Sotho) and Tswana (Western Sotho), though they are considered separate languages. It is a language of secondary education, used on the radio and in newspapers. Sesotho was one of the first African languages to be reduced to writing, and it has an extensive literature. According to scholars the written form was originally based on the Tlokwa dialect. Today the written language is mostly based on the Kwena and Fokeng dialects, although there are variations. It’s a tonal language, and an agglutinating language (based on a combination of simple word elements to express a specific meaning), with many suffixes and prefixes used in sentence construction causing sound changes.

Reprinted from www.unhchr.ch/udhr/