Xhosa

The Xhosa Language

Xhosa (Wikipedia: Xhosa language) is a (Wikipedia: Nguni Bantu) language spoken mainly in Africa. Its widespread use is not very common and only has a small number of individuals enacting the language (11 million)

• Zulu and Xhosa are relatably the most similar due to them both being Nguni transcripts (predominant in Southern Africa)

• Xhosa is also similar to the languages of Swati and Ndebele which are spoken among the Bantu people

Apertium Pairs

Currently, on Apertium, the language of Xhosa is recorded to have one language pair:

• Zulu-?-Xhosa (08 Nov 2010) (incubator)

(list of language pairs)

Computational Linguistics

Xhosa Cross Linguistics

• "Cross linguistics upon Xhosa Corpora Research" - parallel corpora is researched upon the many similarities it contains with other African dialects

The Tone Analysis of Xhosa

• "The Tonemes of Xhosa" - analyzing tones and syllable click sounds in Xhosa

Comparative Studies

Xhosa Literary + Academic Study (Rhodes University)

• "Providing Academic Studies on Literary Aspects of Xhosa" - Xhosa is used as a tool to analyze the complexities and dynamics of African literary production written in African languages.

Comparative Study: Zulu - Xhosa

• "ZuluMorph's Analysis on Xhosa to Zulu Translation" - the similarities between the two languages based on a morphological analyzer (ZuluMorph) cross-linguistically

Linguistic Grammar

• "What is Xhosa?" - a concept summary providing full context over Xhosan grammar
• "The Acquisition of Subject Agreement in Xhosa" - the goal of the present paper is to describe the development of the system of subject agreement in children acquiring Xhosa as a first language.
• "Let’s Talk isiXhosa", the process of mastering a foreign tongue
• "Omniglot Writing Systems and Languages" - a full context of the usage of grammar within the Xhosa language

Xhosa contains multiple prefixes and suffixes which are attached to root words. Thus, the language is declassified into fifteen morphological classes or genders. Furthermore, the language is unique based on its tones, the phonemic low, and high tones;

• they are a [à], á [á], â [áà], ä [àá]. Long vowels are phonemic but are usually not written, except for â and ä

The usage of uncommon consonants is dominant throughout the language in the version of clicks. The language uses 21 clicks (7 dental), however, the number of clicks varies based on each region (Namibia and Botswana primarily)

Full List of Grammar Examples (Apertium Page): Xhosa Grammar Examples

Bilingual/Monolingual Dictionaries

(most are mainly decoded within English subtexts and contexts)

• "Oxford Studies" - The Oxford University has provided many studies with focus mainly on the translational dictionaries available
• "English to Xhosa Bilingual Dictionary" - A full translational dictionary covering most aspects of the dual languages of Xhosa and Zulu
• "Xhosa to English Dictionary" - A complete list of translated and Xhosa applicable words translated into English and vice versa
• "isiXhosa National Lexicography Unit" - The National Lexicography Unit provides additional research of multi-syllable words of Xhosa as well as dictionary referendums
• "Xhosa-English Machine Translation: Working with a Low-Resource Language" - an attempt to implement a phrase-based translation system for translating Xhosa text into English

Elaboration on Machine Translation:

• Machine translation is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one language to another.
• The isiXhosa language is a low resource language for which there are not many morphological analyzers, so much of the research is compiled into putting together a parallel text for which a translation model can be trained

Monolingual/Parallel Corpora

• "Leipzig Corpora Dictionaries" - The Leipzig Corpora Collection contains more than 250 comparable sources on languages and transcripts
• "Crawling Under-Resourced Languages", Transcribing underused dialects using corpora translators
• Koliswa Moropa (2007) - "English/Xhosa Parallel Corpus" - The similarities between English and Xhosa corpora
• "Corpus Linguistics" - An Analysis of Xhosa English
• Natasha Govender, Etienne Barnard, Marelie Davel - "Developing Intonation Corpora for isiXhosa and isiZulu", - University of Pretoria's study upon isiZulu and isiXhosa traits/corpora
• "Corpus Linguistics and World Englishes" - The analysis upon Xhosa English's abstract