Xhosa language

Xhosa
isiXhosa
Native to	South Africa, Lesotho
Region	Eastern Cape, Western Cape
Ethnicity	amaXhosa, amaBhaca
Native speakers	8.2 million (2011 census) 11 million L2 speakers (2002)
Language family	Niger–Congo Atlantic–Congo Benue–Congo Southern Bantoid Bantu Southern Bantu Nguni Zunda Xhosa
Writing system	Latin (Xhosa alphabet) Xhosa Braille
Signed forms	Signed Xhosa
Official status
Official language in	South Africa  Zimbabwe
Language codes
ISO 639-1	xh
ISO 639-2
ISO 639-3
Glottolog	xhos1239
Guthrie code	S.41
Linguasphere	99-AUT-fa incl. varieties 99-AUT-faa to 99-AUT-faj + 99-AUT-fb (isiHlubi)
Proportion of the South African population that speaks Xhosa at home   0–20%   20–40%   40–60%   60–80%   80–100%
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

The Xhosa language (English /ˈkɔːsə/ or /ˈkoʊsə/;Xhosa: isiXhosa [isikǁʰɔ́ːsa]) is a Bantu language with click consonants ("Xhosa" begins with a click) and one of the official languages of South Africa. It is spoken by approximately 7.6 million people, or about 18% of the South African population. Like most other Bantu languages, Xhosa is a tonal language; the same sequence of consonants and vowels can have different meanings, depending on whether it is said with a rising, falling, high or low intonation.

Xhosa is written with the Latin alphabet. Three letters are used to indicate the basic clicks: c for dental clicks, x for lateral clicks and q for post-alveolar clicks (for a more detailed explanation, see the table of consonant phonemes below). Tones are not normally indicated in writing.

Xhosa is the southernmost branch of Nguni languages, which include Swazi, Northern Ndebele and Zulu. There is some mutual intelligibility with other Nguni languages, all of which share many linguistic features.

Nguni languages are, in turn, part of the much larger group of Bantu languages and so Xhosa is related to many languages of Africa.