Monday, February 2, 2009
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On January 28 I will be landing, for the first time in my life, in the African continent.I will arrive at Cape Town, the Mother City, where I will stay until the 8th of July. I will stay at the University of Cape Town where I will take classes and I will do a Service Learning Program.
Xhosa (pronounced [ˈkǁʰoːsa] , isiXhosa) is one of the official languages of South Africa. Xhosa is spoken by approximately 7.9 million people, or about 18% of the South African population. Like most Bantu languages, Xhosa is a tonal language, that is, the same sequence of consonants and vowels can have different meanings when said with a rising or falling or high or low intonation. One of the most distinctive features of the language is the prominence of click consonants; The word "Xhosa," the name of the language itself, begins with a click.
Xhosa is written using a Latin alphabet-based system. Three letters are used to indicate the basic clicks: c for dental clicks, x for lateral clicks, and q for palatal clicks (for a more detailed explanation, see the table of consonant phonemes, below). Tones are not indicated in the written form.
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