'c' is for click sounds, and they're good enough for me

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/04/06 03:08 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/04/06/569669.aspx

There have been several posts about LIPs in the past on this blog.

There was We're drowning in LIPs!, Microsoft, you giving us some LIP?, Let there be LIPs, Oops, we did it again, and there was Oh Kannada... (ಕನ್ನಡ).

I am sure that some people must be getting bored by now of all these releases, huh?

Of course with each Language Interface Pack that is released, there is one group that is in no way bored, whatsoever. That is the group of people who natively use the language for their reading/writing.

And this post is probably no exception, as I point out the Zulu Language Interface Pack has just been released!

Some information about Zulu:

Number of speakers: 10 million native speakers plus about 25 million second language speakers

Name in the language itself: isiZulu

Zulu is one of the 11 official languages of South Africa and is spoken mainly in the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal (where 81% of the population are Zulu first language speakers), Mpumalanga (26%) and Gauteng (21%). Like most indigenous languages it had been largely ignored by the apartheid regime. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, Zulu has experienced a strong revival and it seems to be becoming the lingua franca of the Eastern half of the country.

One of the most distinctive features of Zulu is the use of 15 different click sounds. Click sounds are produced with the tongue; and they are thought to have been "imported" to Zulu and other Bantu languages from the neighboring Khoisan languages.

Classification
Zulu belongs to the Nguni group of Bantu languages which in turn are part of the huge Niger-Congo language family.

Script
Latin script, with c, q, x being used for click sounds.

Enjoy!

This post brought to you by "c" (U+0063, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER C)

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