A lot of LIPs for South Africa!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/11/13 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/11/13/10090513.aspx

THE WINDOWS 7 LANGUAGE INTERFACE PACKS FOR SOUTH AFRICA ARE LIVE!

You can click on the links below to download them via the Microsoft.com Download Center:

Please note that the South African Windows 7 LIPs can only be installed on a system that runs an English client version of Windows 7. They are all available to download for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

The South African Windows 7 LIPs are produced as part of the Local Language Program sponsored by Public Sector.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON THE SOUTH AFRICAN LANGUAGES

NUMBER OF FIRST LANGUAGE SPEAKERS:

Language	Speaker numbers
isiZulu	~10 million
isiXhosa	~8 million
Sesotho sa Leboa	~4 million
Afrikaans	~6.5 million

PREDOMINANT DISTRIBUTION IN SOUTH AFRICA:

SOME FUN FACTS:

IsiZulu and isiXhosa stand apart from the majority of Bantu languages by including a series of click sounds which are borrowed from the indigenous inhabitants of the region, the Khoi and San people (also known as the Bushmen). The first consonant in the stem Xhosa (isi- being a prefix) is a click sound, one of a total of 15 such sounds in that language. The most famous speaker of isiXhosa is Nelson Mandela.
isiZulu has a rich literary tradition that dates back to 1933 when the first novel in isiZulu appeared. Banned from use in the education system and suppressed during the years of Apartheid anywhere in South Africa but in the KwaZulu Bantustan, isiZulu is enjoying a linguistic and cultural revival. Radio and TV shows are broadcasted in the language and the isiZulu language film “Yesterday” was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 77th Academy Awards.
Sesotho sa Leboa is also often referred to as Sepedi or Northern Sotho to distinguish it from its close relative, Sesotho, which is also an official language of South Africa. Sesotho sa Leboa is a cluster of some 30 closely related dialects.
There is a marked degree of mutual intelligibility between Afrikaans and its European ancestor, Dutch.
Afrikaans, finally, is famous for its double negative nie ...nie, which functions very much like the French negation ne ... pas. Two Afrikaans words have made their way into the English lexicon, namely Apartheid and Trek (as in “Star Trek”).

For more information on these languages, see:

Enjoy!

John Cowan on 13 Nov 2010 10:01 AM:

Intelligibilioty, does that mean sharing the same bile duct?

Some more English words of Afrikaans origin: commando, laager (the result of circling the wagons), spoor, scoff/scarf (as in what you do to food when in haste), veld(t), and the local animals aardvark, aardwolf, boomslang, hartebeest, meerkat, springbok, and wildebeest.

Michael S. Kaplan on 13 Nov 2010 10:40 AM:

Aren't some of those from Dutch?

Dale on 14 Nov 2010 1:36 PM:

Zulu was not banned in the education system. In 1973 I was *taught* Zulu in public school there. The 1976 riots *started* as a protest against Afrikaans being the medium of instruction when English was demanded.

Jerome Viveiros on 15 Nov 2010 12:26 AM:

Wow... I'm South African and never knew that Trek originated in Afrikaans. Interesting.

Still, it would be nice if spell-checkers would stop wanting to correct my spellings of various words; like favourite, behaviour, can't remember most others off-hand... I'm not blaming Microsoft; I'm typing this comment in Firefox and both words are marked as spelled incorrectly. It doesn't seem to matter that my language is set to English, South Africa. Maybe the SA English language uses US spelling internally. Actually the only software that appears to get this *right* is Windows Live Writer.

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