Venda language
Venda, also called or, is a Bantu language and an official language of South Africa. Most Venda speakers live in South Africa, but some speakers live in Zimbabwe. The Venda language is very similar to the Kalanga language, which is spoken in Botswana and Zimbabwe. During the Apartheid era of South Africa, Venda speakers lived in the bantustan of Venda.
Venda is a language in the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo language family.
Venda is spoken by about 666,000 people in the northern part of South Africa' s Limpopo Province. Around 84,000 people in Zimbabwe also speak the language.
Writing
The Venda language uses the Latin alphabet. It has five (5) extra accented letters. Four consonants have a circumflex below the letter (d, l, n, t) and one consonant has an overdot (n).
The letters C, J, and Q are used when writing foreign words and names.
Unicode
The extra letters have these Unicode names
U+1E12 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW
U+1E13 LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW
U+1E3C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW
U+1E3D LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW
U+1E44 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH DOT ABOVE
U+1E45 LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH DOT ABOVE
U+1E4A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW
U+1E4B LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW
U+1E70 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW
U+1E71 LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW
References
Other websites
Ethnologue entry for Venda
Tshivenda - South African Languages
Batho Portal Welcome page in Venda
PanAfrican L10n page on Venda
Computer programs
Spell checker for OpenOffice. org and Mozilla, OpenOffice. org, Mozilla Firefox web-browser, and Mozilla Thunderbird email program in Venda
Translate. org. za Project to translate Free and Open Source Software into all the official languages of South Africa including Venda
Keyboard with extra venda characters
Languages of South Africa
Zimbabwe
Bantu languages