Nguni Languages Research Articles

An exploration of translated collocations in the Constitution of South Africa: a corpus-based study

Collocations, or words that occur in proximity to one another, are a linguistic phenomenon that appears in all human languages. Their translation tends to pose a considerable problem for translators because equivalence in meaning is difficult to achieve. This article explores how the collocations in the English version of the Constitution of South Africa have been translated into three Nguni languages, namely Zulu, Swati and Ndebele. Since these languages are closely related, this investigation demonstrates the degree to which lexical collocations are translated differently and whether the translators used the same strategies. ParaConc is used to extract data from the different versions of the Constitution of South Africa. The analysis is qualitative in nature, using descriptive and comparative approaches. By comparing the different collocations in the translations, we establish the way in which the collocations have been translated and also whether the source text message has been conveyed accurately.

What can be said?

Abstract We employ a cluster approach to explore the comparative semantic maps of several markers of modal possibility – the “potential” prefix nga‑ and expressions meaning, roughly, ‘know how to’ and ‘be able to’ – in four South African Nguni languages: isiNdebele, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Siswati. We also compare the Nguni results with results from Xitsonga, a closely related language outside of the Nguni clade. The languages exhibit cross-linguistic differences in the expansion of core meanings, some of which do not appear to follow the cross-linguistically common diachronic pattern in which goal-oriented modality precedes deontic modality. In addition, the distinction between inherent and learned ability is salient in several of these languages. Semantic maps of the markers’ functional distributions further show the diversity of modal systems that can be found even in closely related languages in significant contact with one another.

Algorithm for Assisting Grammarians when Extracting Phonological Conditioning Rules for Nguni languages

Algorithm for Assisting Grammarians when Extracting Phonological Conditioning Rules for Nguni languages

Defining the Anthropocene tropical forest: Moving beyond ‘disturbance’ and ‘landscape domestication’ with concepts from African worldviews

How natural and cultural forces shaping tropical forested landscapes are conceptualised is of vital importance to Anthropocene debates. We examine two concepts: disturbance and landscape domestication. From the perspective of disturbance, humans – whether ancient or modern – are a priori negative for tropical forests, outside of and alien to nature. From this view, the Anthropocene is a planetary scale aggregation of disturbance. A more just vision of tropical forests, accepting anthropogenic influence on biodiversity, would combine ‘disturbance’ with other concepts that capture human agency and intentionality. Landscape domestication proposes that humans can shape ecology and plant and animal population demographics, making the landscape more productive and congenial for humans, upgrading or degrading the biodiversity of tropical forests. Herein, forest peoples shape the Anthropocene itself through their ‘domestication’ of the forest. Yet this approach can overdetermine culture, ignoring non-human agency, whilst human impacts can be seen as the outcome of intentional modifications to increase landscape productivity, at worst a disavowed projection of ‘economic man’. Using the convivial scholarship framework of Nyamnjoh, we argue that these ideas give incomplete views of tropical forests in the Anthropocene and can be enriched by concepts derived from African worldviews with ‘relationality’ and ‘wholeness’ at their core. These are expressed in ohanife, deriving from Igbo language, ubuntu, from the Nguni language and ukama, a notion from Shona culture. Together these concepts evince an ‘eco-bio-communitarianism’ embracing humans, God, spirits, ancestors, animals and inanimate beings in a ‘community of beings’ irreducible to the culture-nature divide (moving beyond disturbance) and allowing for the agency and personhood of non-humans (moving beyond historical ecology). This is consonant with Indigenous Amazonian worldviews, such as that of Kopenawa. Approaching human-nature relations from Nyamnjoh’s idea of conviviality, we elaborate a less incomplete and more just perspective on the cultural and natural shaping of Anthropocene tropical forests.

Verum in Xhosa and Zulu (Nguni)

Abstract In this paper we investigate how verum is realized in Xhosa and Zulu, two Southern Bantu languages belonging to the Nguni group. The data for our study were collected through interviews with native speakers who were prompted to produce sentences in discourse contexts that typically license utterances with verum. We found that the main grammatical strategy for the expression of verum in Xhosa and Zulu involves the removal of phrasal constituents from the focus domain (the VP). This leaves the verb as the sole remaining focus host, and allows auxiliary features of the verb, such as polarity, to be marked as focus. Consequently, we analyse verum in Xhosa and Zulu as polarity focus, which is expressed indirectly, via the backgrounding of potentially focusable phrasal material. We also examined the prosodic properties of verum utterances in Xhosa. Based on findings from previous studies on Nguni intonation, we expected to observe lengthening of the penultimate vowels of phrase-final verbs and utterance-final words in our data. However, contrary to expectation, we did not find evidence of penultimate vowel lengthening in Xhosa sentences with verum, a (preliminary) result which suggests that the expression of verum may have an effect on prosody in Nguni languages.

Ukuzwa ngenkaba: connecting with African ways of knowing through the umbilical cord

ABSTRACT The Nguni term inkaba refers both to the umbilical cord and the navel. In this paper, we use the idea of the umbilical cord to explain an enduring intellectual connection that many African scholars feel towards African epistemes. By drawing on the term inkaba, the paper explores the idea of “umbilical sense” as an intellectual instinct that one develops in relation to a range of knowledges that have been marginalised. This sense speaks to the intellectual orientation drawn from growing and developing as persons within indigenous communities. We argue that the desire and ability to respond to the conceptual shortcomings in Western academe stems from an umbilical sense, or a navel sense – ukuzwa ngenkaba in Nguni languages. Drawing on African writers such as Mazisi Kunene and Ifeanyi Menkiti, we propose that the acquisition of knowledge forms part of an African conception of personhood that links one to many corpuses of historical knowledges. Knowledge thus forms part of how we emerge as persons and, in turn, make other persons. We explore the implications of our concept for current debates on the decolonisation of knowledge and the meaning of post-human knowledge with the emergence of artificial intelligence.

Penultimate lengthening in isiNdebele: A system and its variations

Lengthening of the penultimate syllable in a word, phrase, or utterance is common across Bantu languages, especially in Eastern and Southern Bantu languages. Despite the prevalence of the general phenomenon, there is significant cross-linguistic diversity in how PUL is instantiated. The aim of this paper is to describe the PUL patterns and variation in isiNdebele, a Nguni language spoken in South Africa. IsiNdebele is closely related to Zulu and frequently spoken in situations of intense contact with Zulu, but its realisation of penultimate lengthening nevertheless shows important differences from what has been reported for Zulu and other Nguni languages. In addition, penultimate lengthening in isiNdebele shows significant internal variation, both across speakers and across utterances produced by the same speaker. This variation has implications for both phonological and syntactic analyses of this language: Many studies of phonological phrasing in other Nguni languages use penultimate length as the main phonetic cue for phrase boundaries, but a strict correlation between PUL and phrasing cannot be confirmed for isiNdebele. Lengthening also depends on factors such as speech rate, emphasis, and careful vs. casual speech.

Pan-African identities and literacies: The orthographic harmonisation debate revisited

From the 1940s to the mid-1950s, South African intellectual and political activist, Jacob Mfaniselwa Nhlapo, championed the forging of African political unity through harmonising writing systems for mutually related African language varieties. Owing to his diverse intellectual, professional and political background – a scholar, lawyer, journalist, and political activist – Nhlapo proposed harmonisation not as a purely linguistic enterprise, but as a project centred on the political economy of language. The motivation was to push back the frontiers of colonially imposed fragmentation of African identities through leveraging African language diversity for the political goals of uniting and empowering African people. The fragmentation of African people along ethnic and linguistic lines that prompted Nhlapo’s ideas remains to this day, which means the political imperatives of harmonisation are still relevant now, probably more than ever before. In this article, I revisit the harmonisation proposal to explore those spheres of possibility and promise that it holds for mapping pan-African identities and literacies that transcend current inward-looking, nativist and nation-state-centric conceptions of being and becoming African. What promises do common writing systems for mutually related varieties of African languages hold for enhancing pan-African literacies, education and cross-cultural understanding both in and out of school contexts? To support the arguments advanced in this article, I draw on examples of Nguni languages and the Shona group of languages, with some passing remarks on the Sotho/Tswana group of languages.

Sense of Community: Perceptions of “Inter-Intra” Collaborations in an Academic Environment through the Lenses of Botho Principles and the Field of industrial Psychology

In the current study, I explored the concept of collaboration from Botho principles and the industrial psychology perspective in specific higher learning institutions. Using a qualitative approach, 13 participants performing academic and nonacademic roles formed part of the study. Overall, the participants experiences regarding collaboration in an academic environment are reported to be in the form of hared goals, sense of unity, diversity, and solution-driven teams. Further participants experiences in relation to collaboration is African cultureBotho principles. The latter were perceived contributors to collaboration within departments (intra); and few barriers to collaboration were discovered, such as criteria, lack of shared leadership, lack of collaboration champions or ambassadors. The concept of Botho is defined as a social contract of mutual respect, humanity, and responsibility that members have with one another often referred to as bringing in humanity onto processes or a set environment. Although there are commonalities between Botho and Ubuntu, they however have dissimilarities and are underpinned by different cultures and traditions. Ubuntu is seen often used by a slogan, “I am because you are”. Botho is Setswana or Sesotho concept while Ubuntu forms part of Nguni languages. The I then further conceptualize collaboration through the lens of industrial psychology from the results and offer future research recommendations in the current paper.

The early history of clicks in Nguni

AbstractLanguage contact between migrating Bantu speakers and resident Khoisan speakers has resulted in the adoption of clicks in various southern African Bantu languages. This paper uses the comparative method to show that for one particular cluster of Bantu click languages, the Nguni languages, a large number of phonemic clicks can be reconstructed to its putative ancestor Proto-Nguni, including a palatal click rarely found in Bantu languages and no longer used as such in any living Nguni language. Although clicks have undergone subsequent developments in individual Nguni languages, no new click phonemes were acquired through language contact, showing that clicks were already present very early in the history of the Nguni languages. This relative chronology provides new insights into how the relations between Bantu- and Khoisan-speaking communities in southern Africa developed over time.

Negative attitudes and perceptions of black South African accents in higher education institutions of the Western Cape Province

There is a negative approach and perception of the black South African accent in Drama Departments of higher education institutions in South Africa. The purpose was to discover the experiences of being an actor-in-training at a Drama Department at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and The South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance (AFDA). The research method was a qualitative design, and the sampling method was purposive. The inclusion criteria considered participants who could speak at least one South African language other than English. In other words, the researcher selected black South African natives from the Nguni language groups (isiZulu, isiXhosa, Siswati, isiNdebele) and Bantu language groups (Sesotho, Northern Sotho or Sepedi, Setswana). The exclusion criteria considered anyone registered at UCT or AFDA or already graduated with a degree certificate from those institutions. The researcher analysed the data using the Tesch analysis method. The study has communicated the effects of a voice-training syllabus that ignores authentic black South African vocal abilities. The participants’ experiences have shown a lack of interest in honing and encouraging black South African accents in the voice-training syllabus at Drama Departments in South African universities. It was concluded that there is more emphasis and attention given to British and American accents in the voice-training syllabus in South African universities and that black actors-in-training are encouraged to perform in these accents. The participants expressed that they do not feel prepared to perform characters with black South African accents because of this training.

Benchmarking oral reading fluency in the early grades in Nguni languages

To prevent children from falling behind in the developmental sequence of reading, a shared vision of what reading success looks like is required. This paper provides the first benchmarks for early grade oral reading fluency that are necessary (albeit not sufficient) to read for meaning in three Nguni languages – isiZulu, isiXhosa and Siswati - belonging to the Southern Bantu family of African languages. In contrast with previous benchmarking methodologies, our approach is informed by a non-parametric analysis of longitudinal early grade reading assessment (EGRA) data, guided by reading development theory. The EGRA-type data used for this analysis is the largest compilation of data on early grade fluency in these languages, with comparative assessments for nearly 14,200 children. Analysing empirical regularities and reading trajectories, we identify a lower fluency threshold of 20 correct words per minute (cwpm) and an upper fluency benchmark of 35 cwpm for the early grades. These benchmarks contribute to guiding curriculum policy, provide specificity to improve tracking of literacy progress and address gaps in the literature on reading in African languages.

NLAPOST2021 1st Shared Task on Part-of-Speech Tagging for Nguni Languages

Parts of Speech Tagging (POS Tagging) is a process of assigning labels to each word in text, to indicate its lexical category based on the context it appears in. The POS tagging problem is considered a mostly solved problem in languages with a lot of NLP resources such as English. However, this problem is still an open problem for languages with less NLP resources such as the Nguni languages. This is owing to unavailability of large amounts of labelled data to train POS tagging models. The rich morphological structure and the agglutinative nature of these languages make the POS tagging problem more challenging when compared to a language like English. With this in mind, we have organised a challenge for training POS Tagging models on a limited amount of data for four Nguni languages: isiZulu, siSwati, isiNdebele, and isiXhosa.

Canonical Segmentation and Syntactic Morpheme Tagging of Four Resource- scarce Nguni Languages

Morphological analysis involves investigating the syntactic class of a word but can also extend to the decomposition and syntactic analysis of its underlying morpheme composition. This is especially relevant to languages with an agglutinative writing system where multiple linguistic words are expressed as a single orthographic word. In this paper, we propose a memory-based approach to canonical segmentation using a windowing approach to recover the uncondensed morphemes that differ from the surface form of a word. Additionally, we propose treating the syntactic labelling of morphemes as a sequence labelling task, similar to part of speech tagging. This approach leverages the internal morpheme composition of a word as local context in much the same way that the surrounding sentence of word serves in the disambiguation of its part-of-speech. Both tasks are modelled separately but performed sequentially by cascading the decomposed morphemes of a word into the task of syntactic labelling. When evaluated on four resource-scarce, conjunctively written Nguni languages, the proposed approach achieves an overall accuracy ranging between 82% and 92% which outperforms previously developed rule-based analysers for the same languages.

Development of linguistically annotated parallel language resources for four South African languages

For this project, we collected and annotated data to develop language resources for the four official South African Nguni languages written with a conjunctive orthography. The data for these four languages is parallel to allow for comparative (computational) linguistic studies. The corpora have been annotated for three types of linguistic information (morphology, part-of-speech and lemma). The article focuses on the annotation procedure, design choices that were made along the way as well as the quality control steps used. Hopefully this description will give some guidance for similar projects on under-resourced languages in the future.

Juxtaposing Zulu and Zimbabwean Ndebele lexico-semantic differences: an etymological and shibboleth analysis

ABSTRACT Zulu spoken in South Africa and Northern Ndebele spoken in Zimbabwe are Nguni languages that are particularly close to each other, Zulu is arguably closer to Zimbabwean Ndebele compared to other Nguni languages. It can be argued that one is a dialect of the other but migrations have separated the language groups creating two different languages in different countries. Missionaries who created orthographies for the languages also noted that the languages were similar although spoken in different countries. Since the Ndebele left Zululand there are marked differences in the lexico-semantic stork between Zulu and Ndebele. This paper compares the lexical differences and theorises on the possible causes of these differences; the paper further classifies the types of lexical differences between Zulu and Ndebele. Ndebele pupils at secondary school in Zimbabwe learn both Zulu and Ndebele literature while many Ndebele people work in South Africa where they are exposed to Zulu. The contact between Zulu and Ndebele speakers exposes some disparities in lexes and meanings between the two Nguni languages. Semantic shifts, semantic extensions, efforts at purism and contact borrowing are the main causes of lexico-semantic differences between Zulu and Ndebele.

A method for measuring verb similarity for two closely related languages with application to Zulu and Xhosa


 
 
 There are limited computational resources for Nguni languages and when improving availability for one of the languages, bootstrapping from a related language’s resources may be a cost-saving approach. This requires the ability to quantify similarity between any two closely related languages so as to make informed decisions, of which it is unclear how to measure it. We devised a method for quantifying similarity by adapting four extant similar measures, and present a method of quantifying the ratio of verbs that would need phonological conditioning due to consecutive vowels. The verbs selected are those relevant for weather forecasts for Xhosa and Zulu and newly specified as computational grammar rules. The 52 Xhosa and 49 Zulu rules share 42 rules, supporting informal impressions of their similarity. The morphosyntactic similarity reached 59.5% overall on the adapted Driver-Kroeber metric, with past tense rules only at 99.5%. This similarity score is a result of the variation in terminals mainly for the prefix of the verb.
 
 

Time, space, modality, and (inter)subjectivity: Futures in isiNdebele and other Nguni languages

Perhaps more than any other tense, expressions of futurity are intricately linked with modality: the future is inherently uncertain. This article explores the outcomes of future markers grammaticalised from ‘come’ and ‘go’ in isiNdebele and several other South African Nguni Bantu languages, and shows that their semantic and pragmatic functions can mark contrasts in time, space, and modality, and can be used both subjectively (communicating speaker stance) and intersubjectively (communicating information about the relationship between speakers). Multiple factors influence the choice and interpretation of isiNdebele future markers in different contexts. These factors can all reasonably be traced to developments from ‘come’ and ‘go’, but the semantic and pragmatic force of these markers differs significantly, depending on context. Because different contrasts are emphasised in different contexts, there is significant functional overlap of ‘come’ and ‘go’ futures, despite their different origins and cognitive frames. Cross-linguistic distinctions are observed in the systems of future marking across South African Nguni languages, suggesting that even in a group of closely related languages that are often in heavy contact with one another, significant semantic and pragmatic differences can be maintained.

Forensic parameters and genetic structure based on Y-chromosome short tandem repeats in Lesotho populations

Lesotho is a landlocked country with approximately 2.2 million inhabitants. Over 97% of the population is represented by the Southern Sotho people (Sotho-Tswana group), followed by a number of minorities mostly from the Nguni language group. In this study we investigated the patterns of genetic variation and report genetic diversity, forensic parameters and novel allele variations in 938 unrelated Bantu males. Population pairwise comparisons identified high affinities between the Xhosa and the Vundle, while the largest genetic distance was observed between the Vundle and the Baphuthi ethnic groups (Rst = 0.14878). A high level of genetic differentiation between populations was observed considering culture and language affiliations as opposed to geographic distance.

Investigating click clusters in isiXhosa syllables

Non-native Xhosa speakers find it difficult to pronounce the three clicks c, x, and q, occurring in isiXhosa – one of the Nguni languages in South Africa. Each click represents an Onset (O) as the first component of a consonant-vowel (CV) syllable, even if another consonant accompanies the click; in that way it functions as the pre-vocalic syllabic component, with the vowel (V) as the nucleus of the syllable completing each syllable. The present study informs non-native isiXhosa speakers that the pronunciation of any click or click cluster amounts to a single burst, irrespective of the number of consonants visible in the spelling pattern. The study demonstrates the combination of each click with /g/, /k/, /h/, /n/ and /w/ to derive consonant clusters termed ‘onset syllabic components’. The selected data, extracted from running texts, confirms that the clicks fit into a normal speech chain without unduly impeding the reading rate of isiXhosa literature texts. This study advocates that the ability to break up a text or word containing a click or click cluster into identifiable syllables will facilitate reading. Therefore, in pronunciation, we treat any click cluster as a single sound burst, regardless of it being a di-graph, tri-graph, or quadri-graph in practical orthography.