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The Sotho-Tswana language group is a group of closely related Bantu languages
Bantu languages

The Bantu languages constitute a grouping belonging to the Niger-Congo languages family. This grouping is deep down in the genealogical tree of the Bantoid grouping, which in turn is deep down in the Niger-Congo tree....
 spoken in Southern Africa, including Tswana
Tswana language

Tswana , is a Bantu languages language written in the Latin Alphabet. Tswana is the national and majority language of Botswana, whose people are the Batswana ....
 (Setswana), Northern Sotho
Northern Sotho language

Northern Sotho is one of the official languages of South Africa, and is spoken by nearly five million?4,208,980 people ?in the South African provinces of Gauteng Province, Limpopo Province and Mpumalanga Province....
 (Sesotho sa Leboa), Sotho (Southern Sotho or Sesotho), and Lozi
Lozi language

Lozi, also known as Silozi and Rozi, is a Bantu language that is spoken by the Lozi people, primarily in southwestern Zambia and in surrounding countries....
 (Silozi or Rozi).

The Sotho-Tswana group corresponds to the S.30 label in Guthrie's
Malcolm Guthrie

Malcolm Guthrie , professor of Bantu languages, is known primarily for his classification of Bantu languages . The classification, although certainly not undisputed, and probably somewhat outdated, is still the most widely used....
(1967-1971) classification of languages in the Bantu family. As such, Sotho-Tswana includes a number of other language varieties which fall inside this approximate genetic subgrouping of southeastern Bantu.






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The Sotho-Tswana language group is a group of closely related Bantu languages
Bantu languages

The Bantu languages constitute a grouping belonging to the Niger-Congo languages family. This grouping is deep down in the genealogical tree of the Bantoid grouping, which in turn is deep down in the Niger-Congo tree....
 spoken in Southern Africa, including Tswana
Tswana language

Tswana , is a Bantu languages language written in the Latin Alphabet. Tswana is the national and majority language of Botswana, whose people are the Batswana ....
 (Setswana), Northern Sotho
Northern Sotho language

Northern Sotho is one of the official languages of South Africa, and is spoken by nearly five million?4,208,980 people ?in the South African provinces of Gauteng Province, Limpopo Province and Mpumalanga Province....
 (Sesotho sa Leboa), Sotho (Southern Sotho or Sesotho), and Lozi
Lozi language

Lozi, also known as Silozi and Rozi, is a Bantu language that is spoken by the Lozi people, primarily in southwestern Zambia and in surrounding countries....
 (Silozi or Rozi).

The Sotho-Tswana group corresponds to the S.30 label in Guthrie's
Malcolm Guthrie

Malcolm Guthrie , professor of Bantu languages, is known primarily for his classification of Bantu languages . The classification, although certainly not undisputed, and probably somewhat outdated, is still the most widely used....
(1967-1971) classification of languages in the Bantu family. As such, Sotho-Tswana includes a number of other language varieties which fall inside this approximate genetic subgrouping of southeastern Bantu. These include Lozi and numerous varieties of Northern Sotho.

Lozi, too, is a Sotho-Tswana language spoken in Zambia
Zambia

The Republic of Zambia is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. The neighbouring countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Tanzania to the north-east, Malawi to the east, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia to the south, and Angola to the west....
 and northeastern Namibia
Namibia

Namibia, officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in southern Africa on the Atlantic Ocean coast. It shares borders with Angola and Zambia to the north, Botswana to the east, and South Africa to the south....
 (in the Caprivi
Caprivi Strip

Caprivi, sometimes called the Caprivi Strip or the Okavango Strip and formally known as Itenge, is a panhandle of Namibia eastwards about 450 km , between Botswana on the south, Angola and Zambia to the north, and Okavango Region to the west....
). Lozi is much more distinct from the other Sotho-Tswana languages (than these others are internally from each other), due to heavy linguistic influences from Luyaana, and possibly other Zambian and Caprivi languages. In the Guthrie work—as is now widely acknowledged—Lozi was misclassified as K.21.

Northern Sotho—which appears largely to be a taxonomic holding category for what is Sotho-Tswana but neither identifiably Southern Sotho nor Tswana—subsumes highly varied language varieties (or 'dialect
Dialect

A dialect is a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class....
s', in the neutral linguistic sense), including Pedi (Sepedi), Tswapo (Setswapo), Lovedu
Lobedu language

Lobedu is a Bantu languages language regarded as a dialect of Northern Sotho. It exists only in an unwritten form and the standard Northern Sotho language and orthography is usually used for teaching and writing by this language community....
 (Khilobedu), Pai and Pulana.

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