Tswana

How missionaries first described Setswana

The German traveller Hinrich Lichtenstein lived among the Batlhaping in 1806 and was the first European to describe the language, though his work was not published until 1930. He took it for a dialect of isiXhosa, and his name for it, Beetjuana, may also have covered Sepedi and Sesotho. Moffat, who had lived among the same people, followed with his spelling book and catechism of 1826.

James Archbell published the first grammar in 1833, still modelled on isiXhosa. The French missionary E. Casalis treated Setswana as separate from isiXhosa in 1841 and by 1882 had also separated it from Sepedi and Sesotho. Solomon Plaatje, a South African intellectual and linguist, was among the first to write at length in and about the language.

Where Setswana is spoken in South Africa

North West Province holds the core, with over 70% of its people speaking the language, followed by Gauteng at about 11% and the Northern Cape. Until 1994 South Africa's Batswana were notionally citizens of Bophuthatswana, an apartheid bantustan. Speech varies between the Bakgatla, Barolong, Bakwena, Batlhaping and other groups, while the written language stays the same. Sepitori, an urbanised variety, is the distinctive language of Pretoria. Zimbabwe has a small, uncounted number of speakers.

Why tone goes unwritten in Setswana

Setswana has a high and a low tone, and the spelling marks neither, which can leave words ambiguous: go bua means to speak or to skin an animal depending on tone alone. A high tone spreads to the next two syllables unless they end the word. Stress is fixed on the second-to-last syllable, which is lengthened. The letter š entered the spelling in 1937, though sh is still sometimes written.