Sotho Orthography

Sotho Orthography

Notes:

• The orthography used in this and related articles is that of South Africa, not Lesotho. For a discussion of the differences between the two see the notes on Sesotho orthography.
• Hovering the mouse cursor over most italic Sesotho text should reveal an IPA pronunciation key (excluding tones).

The orthography of the Sotho language is fairly recent and is based on the Latin alphabet, but, like most languages written using the Latin alphabet, it does not use all the letters; as well, several digraphs and trigraphs are used to represent single sounds.

The orthographies used in Lesotho and South African differ, with the Lesotho variant using diacritics.

As with almost all other Bantu languages, although the language is a tonal language, tone is never indicated.

For an overview of the symbols used and the sounds they represent, see the phoneme tables at Sotho phonology.

Note that often when a section discusses formatives, affixes, or vowels it may be necessary to view the IPA to see the proper conjunctive word division and vowel qualities.