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Sepedi is one of the main dialects on which the BantuNorthern Sotho language is based. For this reason, the name Sepedi came to be incorrectly used to refer to Northern Sotho.
I am not sure if it is proper to refer to Sepedi as a dilect because it has numerous dilects itself (more than 20, I guess). The language Sepedi, as commonly used in the Northern part of South Africa, belongs to the Sotho Language group, together with Southern Sotho (seshweshwe) and Setswana. It may be argued that this language group - constituted by Sepedi, Sestwana, and Seshweshwe(Southeren Sotho) - cannot be refferred to as the Sotho group since that would be to suggest that Tswana or Setswana has no independent existence from the two. This however does not shake the strength of the idea that if one speaks one of the three languages, it is easier to speak the other two due to vast similarities among the three. A point to note, however, is that Sepedi, Setswana, and Seshweshwe(Southern Sotho) are not dilects, but languages with different rules and grammar: they are written completely different from each other. The difference among these languages is not equaivalent to the difference between Bosniak, Croat, or Serbo laguages, for the latter are not realisically different.
The reason for this was, among others, to indicate that Sepedi had the terminology necessary to serve as a vehicle for conveying the content of the subject field.
If the results of those who wrote the Sepedi paper are significantly better, a deliberate attempt should be made to convince students, parents and school principals that mother-tongue teaching of content subjects is a step forward and not backward.
The standardisation of Science terms in Sepedi should be encouraged and accelerated in the meantime by recording existing terms in term banks, publishing them in the form of bi- or multilingual term lists and dictionaries, distributing these in schools, and also requesting feedback from all stakeholders: pupils, parents, teachers and principals.
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