Sotho alphabet
Notes:
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The orthography of the Sotho language is fairly recent and is based on the Latin alphabet, but, like most languages written using the Latin alphabet, it does not use all the letters; as well, several digraphs and trigraphs are used to represent single sounds.
The orthographies used in Lesotho and South Africa differ, with the Lesotho variant using diacritics.
As with almost all other Bantu languages, although the language is a tonal language, tone is never indicated.
For an overview of the symbols used and the sounds they represent, see the phoneme tables at Sotho phonology.
The original orthography was developed in the early 19th century by missionaries from the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society to aid in translating the Bible. The earliest orthographies were more like French spelling, still seen in the writing of the approximants /j/ and /w/ in the modern Lesotho variant.
One issue which complicates the written language is the two divergent orthographies used by the two countries with the largest number of first language speakers. The Lesotho orthography is older than the South African one and differs from it not only in the choice of letters and the marking of initial syllabic nasals, but also (to a much lesser extent) in written word division and the use of diacritics on vowels to distinguish some ambiguous spellings.
Additionally, in older texts the nasalized click was written nǵ in Lesotho (as a relic of a much older click series: ḱ, ḱh, and nǵ), but now the more universal digraph nq is used in both countries.
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