Sesotho orthography

The orthography of the Sesotho 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 and several digraphs and trigraphs represent single sounds.

The orthographies used in Lesotho and South African 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 Sesotho phonology.:"Note that often when a section discusses formatives, affixes, or vowels it may be necessary to view the IPA to see the proper conjunctive word division and vowel qualities."

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History

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 had an obvious French bias, which still appears in the writing of the approximants IPA|/j/ and IPA|/w/ in the modern Lesotho variant.

Lesotho versus South African writing

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.

Notes

References

*Bird, S. 1998. "Strategies for representing tone in African writing systems: A critical review".