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Language code: st

Technical information about ISO 639 language code st

Documentation

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

Code

st

Name

Official

Sotho, Southern

Native

Sesotho

Family
Bantu
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Language varieties
KwenaFokengTlokwaTaung
Related languages
Northern SothoTswanaLoziKgalagadi
Key facts
Employs about 15 noun classes, a hallmark of Bantu grammarTone is phonemic and marks both lexical meaning and grammatical relationsAgglutinative morphology gives long verb forms with multiple affixes agreeing for subject, object and moodFirst comprehensive Sesotho grammar was compiled by missionary Eugène Casalis in the 1840sConsonant inventory includes prenasalized, aspirated and ejective stops, making rich consonant clusters possible
Sample phrase

Lumela, o phela joang?

Character encodings

UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Southern Sotho, also known as Sesotho, belongs to the Niger-Congo language family, specifically within the Bantu subgroup. It is one of the official languages of Lesotho and South Africa. Southern Sotho is written using the Latin script (Sesotho alphabet). It is estimated that there are around 13 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

South Africa

12M

Lesotho

1.8M

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

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