Setswana (South African)

Abstract

Setswana (also known as ‘Tswana’ or, more archaically, ‘Chuana’ or ‘Sechuana’) is a Bantu language (group S.30; ISO code tsn) spoken by an estimated four million people in South Africa. There are a further one million or more speakers in Botswana, where it is the dominant national language, and a smaller number of speakers in Namibia. The recordings accompanying this article were mostly produced with a 21-year-old male speaker from the area of Taung, North-West province, South Africa. Some of the accompanying recordings are of a 23-year-old female speaker from Kuruman (approximately 150 km west of Taung). The observations reported here are based on consulting with both these speakers, as well as a third speaker, from Kimberley. All three were speakers of South African Setswana varieties. For discussion of some differences between these varieties and more Northern and Eastern Setswana dialects – including those spoken in Botswana – see (Doke 1954, Cole 1955, University of Botswana 2001).

Blowing in the wind: Using ‘North Wind and the Sun’ texts to sample phoneme inventories

“…Examples of errors found in the initial parsing that were then subsequently included in the phonemic inventory (either as phonemes or allophones) included: (i) instances where a phoneme wasn't entered into the phoneme chart; (ii) instances where allophones weren't identified in the initial coding of data; and (iii) instances of phonetic processes marked in the text transcription, but not discussed in the paper. An example of the first phenomenon is that /w/ was not included in the phoneme inventory chart for Setswana (Bennett et al 2016), but from discussion in the paper, and notably the list of phonemes with example words, it was clearly a phoneme. An example of the second phenomenon is that on first parsing of Lower Xumi (Chirkova & Chen 2013b) schwa was found in the Illustrative text, but was unaccounted for in the phoneme inventory.…”

BRIAN WILLAN, Sol Plaatje: A life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876–1932. Auckland Park [Johannesburg]: Jacana, 2018. Pp. xxiv + 711. ISBN: 9781431426447

“…Given the central role of the Setswana language in Plaatje's life and Willan's narrative, it is somewhat disappointing that Willan does not anywhere give a coherent sketch of the main features of the language, instead scattering examples piecemeal through the text, and does not cite an up-to-date reference on Setswana phonetics or tone (an excellent choice would be Bennett et al 2016).…”