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The Tswana language, ''Setswana'', is a language spoken in southern Africa by about five million people.〔 It is a Bantu language belonging to the Niger–Congo language family within the Sotho languages branch of Zone S (S.30), and is closely related to the Northern- and Southern Sotho languages, as well as the Kgalagadi language and the Lozi language. Tswana is an official language and lingua franca of Botswana. The majority of Tswana speakers are found in South Africa, where four million people speak the language, and where an urbanised variety known as Pretoria Sotho is the principal language of that city. Until 1994, South African Tswana people were notionally citizens of Bophuthatswana, one of the bantustans of the apartheid regime. Although Tswana language is significantly spoken in South Africa and Botswana, a small number of speakers are also found in Zimbabwe and Namibia, where respectively an unknown number of people and about 10,000 people speak the language.〔 == History == The first European to describe the Tswana language was the German traveller H. Lichtenstein, who lived among the Tswana people Batlhaping in 1806, although his work was not published until 1930. He mistakenly regarded Tswana as a dialect of the Xhosa language, and the name he used for the language ''"Beetjuana"'' may also have covered the Northern- and Southern Sotho languages. The first major work on the Tswana language was carried out by the British missionary Robert Moffat, who had also lived among the Batlhaping, and published ''Bechuana Spelling Book'' and ''A Bechuana Catechism'' in 1826. In the following years he published several other books of the Bible and in 1857 he was able to publish a complete translation of the Bible. The first grammar of the Tswana language was published in 1833 by the missionary James Archbell, although it was modelled on a Xhosa grammar. The first grammar of Tswana which regarded it as a separate language from Xhosa (but still not as a separate language from the Northern- and Southern Sotho languages) was published by the French missionary E. Casalis in 1841. He changed his mind later, and in a publication from 1882 he noted that the Northern- and Southern Sotho languages were distinct from Tswana. In 1876 the South African intellectual and linguist Solomon Plaatje was born, and he became one of the first writers to extensively write in and about the Tswana language.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tswana language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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