Northern and Southern Ndebele—Why harmonisation will not work

Abstract

The Ndebele people of South Africa comprise of two main groups known as the Southern and the Northern Ndebele people respectively. They are genealogically related by being the descendants of the same ancestral king but have separated many years ago as a result of a succession struggle. Ever since that time they occupy different parts of the country and have very little contact with each other. Some linguists regard the languages spoken by these groups as variants of the same language while others consider them to be separate languages. The actual linguistic relationship between these two Ndebele speech forms has, however, never been seriously investigated before, partly because of a lack of information regarding the Southern Ndebele language and partly because linguists believed that the Northern Ndebele language had for all practical purposes ceased to exist as its speakers had rejected it in favour of Northern Sotho, the dominant language of the surrounding tribes. Southern Ndebele has now been properly documented while this investigation has found that Northern Ndebele is still widely spoken in most, if not all the Northern Ndebele communities in the Northern Province. Since the advent of the new political dispensation in South Africa the Northern Ndebele people have campaigned to get their mother tongue officially recognized as an independent language. Their efforts thus far have, however, not been very successful mainly because of the perception prevailing among language planners and other decision makers that their language is a variant form of Southern Ndebele and that it consequently will be in the best interest of both these languages if they are harmonised into a single unified language. In this article evidence is presented that convincingly shows that these two Ndebele speech forms are not variants of the same language, that they are, in fact, two independent languages and that their harmonisation is therefore bound to fail as it inevitably will lead to the creation of an artificial speech form that the Ndebele people are certain to reject.