祖鲁语

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祖鲁语 -{isiZulu}-
通行区：	南非, 马拉维, 莫桑比克, 斯威士兰
区域：	祖鲁
总使用人数：	约 9 百万
排名:	87
语系：	尼日尔-刚果语系 Atlantic-Congo Volta-Congo Benue-Congo languages Bantoid Southern Narrow Bantu Central S Nguni 祖鲁语
官方地位
作为官方语言的国家：	南非
管理机构：	无官方机构
语言代码
ISO 639-1：	`zu`
ISO 639-2：	`zul`
ISO/DIS 639-3：	`zul`
注意：本頁包含 Unicode 的國際音標

祖鲁语（祖鲁语：isiZulu）是祖鲁人所使用的一種语言。目前大约有九百万人使用，其中的95%居住于南非共和国境内。24%南非人的母語是祖鲁语,也是南非最大的语言，国内大约50%的人可明白祖鲁语(Ethnologue 2005)。在种族隔离结束後，祖鲁语在1994年成为南非11个官方语言的其中一个。

[编辑] 地理分布

祖鲁语属班图语言的东南支，亦称Nguni组。

祖鲁语也在夸祖鲁-纳托尔省与豪登省广泛使用。莱索托与斯威士兰也有少数祖鲁语使用者。津巴布韦的Ndebele语言,与马拉维的Ngoni语言是祖鲁语的亲戚。三者都可追寻到十九世纪的祖鲁移民。

[编辑] 历史

The original Zulu homeland seems to have been in the region of modern 坦桑尼亚. The Zulu presence in South Africa dates from about the fourteenth century AD. A Zulu independent kingdom existed already in 1832.

The first written document wtitten in Zulu was a Bible translation that appeared in 1883. In 1901 John Dube (1871-1946), a Zulu from Natal, created the Ohlange Institute, the first native educational institution in South Africa. He was also the author of Insila kaChaka, the first novel written in Zulu (1933). Another pioneering Zulu writer was Reginald Dhlomo, author of several historical novels of the 19th-century leaders of the Zulu nation: : U-Dingane (1936), U-Shaka (1937), U-Mpande (1938), U-Cetshwayo (1952) and U-Dinizulu (1968).

The written form of Zulu is controlled by the Zulu Language Board of KwaZulu-Natal.

[编辑] 语音

One of its most distinctive features of Zulu is the use of click consonants. This feature is shared with several other languages of Southern Africa, but is almost entirely constrained to this region. There are three basic clicks in Zulu:

c - dental
q - alveolar
x - lateral

These can have several variants such as being voiced, aspirated or nasalised so that there are a total of about 15 different click sounds in Zulu. The same sounds occur in Xhosa, where they are used more frequently than in Zulu.

[编辑] 语法

Some of the main grammatical features of Zulu are:

Constituent word order is Subject Verb Object.
Morphologically, it is an agglutinative language.
As in other Bantu languages, nouns are classified in thirteen morphological classes, with different prefixes for singular and plural. Various parts of speech that qualify a noun must agree with the noun according to its morphological class. These agreements usually reflect part of the original class that it is agreeing with. An example of this is the use of the class 'aba-':

Bonke abantu abaqatha bepulazi bayayigawula.

All the strong people of the farm are felling (trees).

Here, the various agreement that qualify the word 'abantu' (people) can be seen in effect.

Its verbal system shows a combination of temporal and aspectual categories in their finite paradigm. Typically verbs have two stems, one for Present-Indefinite and another for Perfect. Different prefixes can be attached to these verbal stems to specify subject agreement and various degrees of past or future tense. For example, in the word uthanda ("he loves"), the Present stem of the verb is -thanda, and the prefix u- expresses third-person singular subject.

Suffixes are also put into common use to show the causitive or reciprocal forms of a verb stem.

Most property words (words which are encoded as adjectives in English) are morphologically verbs, such is the sentence umuntu uBomvu ("the person is red"), the word uBomvu (root -Bomvu) behaves exactly as a verb, including the agreement prefix u-, as in the example above.