A Grouping Used From Inside

The Nguni languages form a tight cluster inside the wider Bantu grouping, spoken across southeastern Africa: Zulu and Xhosa in South Africa, Swazi in Eswatini, Southern Ndebele in South Africa and Northern Ndebele in Zimbabwe, the last of these carried north by the migration of Mzilikazi's followers in the early nineteenth century. The languages are close. A Zulu speaker and a Xhosa speaker can hold a conversation with effort and a good deal of adjustment, which is unusual for a grouping at this level and is what makes this one different from most of the entries in this type.

Where Bantu is a category drawn by outsiders and unused by the people it covers, Nguni is a word in circulation among the peoples themselves as well as among linguists, and the two uses do not pull apart. The cluster is also marked by click consonants, borrowed from Khoisan languages through long contact and intermarriage, which is a reminder that a family tree records descent and not the whole history of a language: Zulu is Bantu by descent and carries sounds it acquired from somewhere else entirely. The cluster also supplies the atlas with a caution about scale. Zulu and Xhosa are separate peoples with separate histories, and grouping them says nothing about the wars, alliances and states that divided them, the Zulu kingdom under Shaka above all.