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|notice=IPA }} The Xhosa language ( or ;〔Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student's Handbook'', Edinburgh〕 Xhosa: (:isikǁʰɔ́ːsa)) is one of the official languages of South Africa. Xhosa is spoken by approximately 7.6 million people, or about 18% of the South African population. Like most Bantu languages, Xhosa is a tonal language; that is, the same sequence of consonants and vowels can have different meanings when said with a rising or falling or high or low intonation. One of the most distinctive features of the language is the prominence of click consonants; the word "Xhosa" begins with a click. Xhosa is written using a Latin alphabet. Three letters are used to indicate the basic clicks: ''c'' for dental clicks, ''x'' for lateral clicks, and ''q'' for post-alveolar clicks (for a more detailed explanation, see the table of consonant phonemes, below). Tones are not indicated in the written form. ==Classification== Xhosa is the southernmost branch of the Nguni languages, which include Swati, Northern Ndebele〔(Online Xhosa-English Dictionary )〕 and Zulu. There is some mutual intelligibility with the other Nguni languages, all of which share many linguistic features. Nguni languages are in turn part of the much larger group of Bantu languages, and as such Xhosa is related to languages spoken across much of Africa.〔(UCLA Xhosa Language Materials Project )〕 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「Xhosa language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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