Language code: ts

Technical information about ISO 639 language code ts

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

Code

ts

Name

Official

Tsonga

Native

Xitsonga

Family
Bantu
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Language varieties
GwambaChangana (Shangaan)RongaHlanganuHlave
Related languages
TswaRongaChopi
Key facts
Belongs to the Southern Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo familyOrthography was first systematized by Swiss missionaries in the late 1800sHas two contrastive tones that carry lexical and grammatical meaningPossesses nasalised implosive consonants uncommon in many neighbouring languagesUtilises an extensive noun-class agreement system typical of Bantu languages
Sample phrase

Avuxeni, xana u njhani?

Character encodings

UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Tsonga belongs to the Niger-Congo language family, more specifically to the Bantu subgroup. It is one of the official languages in South Africa and is also spoken in some parts of Zimbabwe and Mozambique. It is written using the Latin script (Tsonga alphabet). It is estimated that there are around 10 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

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

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