Spoken by more than 25% of South Africans, isiZulu is the country’s most widely spoken language.
Spoken by more than 25% of South Africans, isiZulu is the country’s most widely spoken language. It is a beautiful language with clicks and tones that ingeniously capture the richness of Zulu culture.
Despite its wide use, isiZulu is written using 26 Latin letters that do not properly capture the pronunciation of the words and their meanings. As a result, research shows that reading isiZulu takes longer than reading other languages that use Latin letters.
Because of the difficulty of reading isiZulu, learning with isiZulu as a medium of instruction in schools is burdensome and dissuades teachers and learners from using the language. This education gap stifles isiZulu literature and cultural expression, deeming the language inferior to other languages used in professional settings such as English and Afrikaans.
At the end of apartheid, the democratically elected government should have invested in developing African literature and cultural expression. We failed, but there is still a chance.
IsiZulu is an agglutinative language, which means words are made up of small units that determine meaning. As a result, isiZulu words are long and take time to write. Although spoken isiZulu shortens words, written professional isiZulu is lengthy and cannot be shortened without changing the meaning.
IsiZulu is also a tonal language, meaning that words have tones that determine their meaning. For example, the word “umfundisi” can mean either “teacher” or “priest,” depending on the tone used by the speaker. Reading words like this makes it difficult for a person to grasp the meaning of written isiZulu text.
Other tonal languages such as Mandarin have tone markers when written using the 26 Latin letters. For instance, “sì,” which means the number four, and “sǐ,” which means death, are differentiated by tone markers above the letter “i.”
Similar tone markers are needed to make written isiZulu easier and more accessible.
The department of basic education, the department of higher education and training, and the department of cooperative governance and traditional affairs should be involved in this process of capturing the nuances of the language.
Working with traditional and cultural leaders will be necessary, because they are aware of linguistic and cultural nuances that the average isiZulu speaker may not know. Nuances such as “ulimi lwezigodi, which directly translates to “language of valleys” but refers to dialect-like differences among Zulu kingdoms and chiefdoms, are areas of expertise for traditional and cultural leaders.
A writing system that accurately captures the language’s richness will promote isiZulu literature and the use of it in professional settings.
As a country still recovering from a system that instilled a sense of inferiority in African cultures, a writing system that allows the language to express the depth of the writer’s history and identity will safeguard our nation’s cultural diversity and history.
The idea of linguistic reform is not without precedent. In South Korea, the creation of Hangul in the 15th century revolutionised literacy and education by providing a phonetic script tailored to the Korean language, which was previously written using Chinese characters. Similarly, in New Zealand, the Māori language has been supported by the development of educational resources and media content, preserving the language for future generations.
By investing in an overhaul of isiZulu’s writing system, we are not merely modernising a language, we are reclaiming part of our heritage.
Lindani Zungu is the founder of Voices of Mzansi.