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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 Benue-Congo group of languages constitutes the largest branch of the Niger_Congo language family, both in terms of sheer number of languages, of which 938 are known (not counting mere dialects), and in terms of speakers, numbering perhaps 550 million.
Xhosa is one of the official languages of South Africa.
Jump to: navigation, search In oral language, a phoneme is the theoretical basic unit of sound that can be used to distinguish words or morphemes; that is, changing a phoneme in a word produces either nonsense, or a different word with a different meaning.
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