Introduction

Another family of languages that has had a significant influence on Sesotho is the Nguni group. So great has been the influence of Nguni languages on Sesotho that it has been identified as one of the major factors that distinguish Sesotho from the other Sotho-Tswana languages. The 19th century linguistic Bleek (1858, 117) notes that

A century later, Auer (1971, 13) makes a similar comment, observing that ‘Southern Sotho … is the most deviant … [of Sotho-Tswana languages], influenced as it is predominantly from the Nguni-group’. As will be seen in the following sections, the heavy borrowing of Nguni items was brought about by the special relationship that Sesotho had with these languages.

Contact with the Nguni Languages

It has been indicated that the ancestor of Sotho-Tswana languages and the ancestor of Nguni languages – and the ancestors of all Southern Bantu languages – developed from closely related Prot-Bantu (PB) dialects that were offshoots of the Proto-South Eastern Bantu (PSEB). Initially, these languages developed together, with the Limpopo valley identified as the region where the ancestor of Sesotho and the ancestors of the other South Eastern Bantu (SEB) languages were initially spoken (Ehret 2008). The discrepancies between the ancestors of the SEB languages started to occur when the speakers of the languages migrated into different parts of Southern Africa.