The Status of Sotho Today
The language of the Sotho may be referred to as SeSotho or less commonly Sesotho sa borwa). Some texts may refer to Sotho as “Southern Sotho” to differentiate it from Pedi.
Sotho is the first language of 1.5 million people in Lesotho, or 85% of the population. Sotho is one of the two official languages in Lesotho, the other being English. Lesotho enjoys one of Africa’s highest literacy rates with 59% of the adult population being literate chiefly in Sotho.
In South Africa, almost 4 million people speak Sotho as a first language. 62% of the inhabitants of the Free State speak Sotho as a first language. Approximately, 10% of the residents of Gauteng speak Sotho at a first language level. In the North West Province 5% of the population speaks first language Sotho, with a concentration of speakers in the Maboloka region. 3% of Mpumalanga’s people speak Sotho as a first language, with many speakers living in the Standerton area. 2% of the residents of the Eastern Cape, chiefly in the northern regions of the province, speak Sotho as a first language.
No Statistics SA data on second language usage is available but a conservative estimate of the number of people who speak Sotho as a second (or third, or fourth…) language is 5 million. Sotho is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa.
Aside from Lesotho and South Africa, 60 000 people speak Silozi (a close relative of Sotho) in Zambia. Small numbers of Sotho speakers reside in Botswana, Swaziland and the Caprivi Strip of Namibia.
Sotho is used in a range of educational settings both as a subject of study and as a medium of instruction. It is used in its spoken and written forms in all the spheres of education from pre schooling to doctoral studies. Difficulties still exist when using Sotho as a technical language in the fields of commerce, information technology, science, mathematics and law since the corpus of technical materials in Sotho is still relatively small.
Sotho has developed a sizable media presence since the end of apartheid. Radio Lesedi is a 24-hour Sesotho radio station run by the SABC (South Africa’s national broadcasting corporation), broadcasting solely in Sotho.There are other regional radio stations as well throughout Lesotho and the Free State. Half hour Sotho news bulletins are broadcast daily on a government TV station. Independent TV broadcaster, eTV, also features a daily 30 minute Sotho bulletin. Both SABC and the eTV group produce a range of programs which feature at least some Sotho dialogue.
Most newspapers in Lesotho are written either mainly in Sesotho or in both Sesotho and English; currently in South Africa there is one mainstream magazine, namely Bona; there are no fully fledged newspapers in Sotho though, except for regional news-letters in Qwaqwa, Fouriesburg, Ficksburg and possibly other Free State towns.
The popular monthly magazine “Bona” includes Sotho content. Since the codification of Sotho orthography, literary works have been produced in Sotho. Amongst the most notable are Thomas Mofolo’s epic, "Chaka", which has been translated into several languages including English and German
Read more about this topic: Sotho People
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