Language code: ss

Technical information about ISO 639 language code ss

The table below provides technical details for the Swati language, designated by the ss code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

ss

Name

Official

Swati

Native

SiSwati

Family
Bantu
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Language varieties
Hhohho (Northern Swati)Manzini (Central Swati)Lubombo (Eastern Swati)Shiselweni (Southern Swati)
Related languages
ZuluXhosaSouthern NdebeleNorthern Ndebele
Key facts
Member of the Nguni branch of the Bantu familyContains click consonants borrowed from Khoisan languagesWritten with the Latin alphabet plus extra letters such as ɓ, ǀ, ǃ to mark distinctive consonantsShares about 70 % lexical similarity with ZuluHas a rich noun-class system of more than fifteen classes
Sample phrase

Sawubona, unjani?

Character encodings

UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Swati belongs to the Niger-Congo language family, more specifically to the Bantu subgroup. It is one of the official languages of Eswatini and South Africa. It is written using the Latin script. It is estimated to have around 4.5 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Swati speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

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