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"

The Tone Analysis of Xhosa

• "The Tonemes of Xhosa"

Comparative Studies

Xhosa Literary + Academic Study (Rhodes University)

• "Providing Academic Studies on Literary Aspects of Xhosa"

Comparative Study: Zulu - Xhosa

• "ZuluMorph's Analysis on Xhosa to Zulu Translation"

Linguistic Grammar

• "What is Xhosa?"
• "The Acquisition of Subject Agreement in Xhosa"
• "Let’s Talk isiXhosa", the process of mastering a foreign tongue
• "Omniglot Writing Systems and Languages"

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"
• "English to Xhosa Bilingual Dictionary"
• "Xhosa to English Dictionary"
• "isiXhosa National Lexicography Unit"
• "Xhosa-English Machine Translation: Working with a Low-Resource Language"

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"
• "Crawling Under-Resourced Languages"
• Koliswa Moropa (2007) - "English/Xhosa Parallel Corpus"
• "Corpus Linguistics" -
• Natasha Govender, Etienne Barnard, Marelie Davel - "Developing Intonation Corpora for isiXhosa and isiZulu"
• "Corpus Linguistics and World Englishes"