1.
South Africa
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South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa, is the southernmost country in Africa. South Africa is the 25th-largest country in the world by land area and it is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World or the Eastern Hemisphere. About 80 percent of South Africans are of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, divided among a variety of ethnic groups speaking different Bantu languages, the remaining population consists of Africas largest communities of European, Asian, and multiracial ancestry. South Africa is a multiethnic society encompassing a variety of cultures, languages. Its pluralistic makeup is reflected in the recognition of 11 official languages. The country is one of the few in Africa never to have had a coup détat, however, the vast majority of black South Africans were not enfranchised until 1994. During the 20th century, the black majority sought to recover its rights from the dominant white minority, with this struggle playing a role in the countrys recent history. The National Party imposed apartheid in 1948, institutionalising previous racial segregation, since 1994, all ethnic and linguistic groups have held political representation in the countrys democracy, which comprises a parliamentary republic and nine provinces. South Africa is often referred to as the Rainbow Nation to describe the multicultural diversity. The World Bank classifies South Africa as an economy. Its economy is the second-largest in Africa, and the 34th-largest in the world, in terms of purchasing power parity, South Africa has the seventh-highest per capita income in Africa. However, poverty and inequality remain widespread, with about a quarter of the population unemployed, nevertheless, South Africa has been identified as a middle power in international affairs, and maintains significant regional influence. The name South Africa is derived from the geographic location at the southern tip of Africa. Upon formation the country was named the Union of South Africa in English, since 1961 the long form name in English has been the Republic of South Africa. In Dutch the country was named Republiek van Zuid-Afrika, replaced in 1983 by the Afrikaans Republiek van Suid-Afrika, since 1994 the Republic has had an official name in each of its 11 official languages. Mzansi, derived from the Xhosa noun umzantsi meaning south, is a name for South Africa. South Africa contains some of the oldest archaeological and human fossil sites in the world, extensive fossil remains have been recovered from a series of caves in Gauteng Province. The area is a UNESCO World Heritage site and has termed the Cradle of Humankind
2.
Swaziland
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Swaziland, officially the Kingdom of Eswatini, is a sovereign state in Southern Africa. It is neighboured by Mozambique to its northeast and by South Africa to its north, west and south, the country and its people take their names from Mswati II, the 19th-century king under whose rule Swazi territory was expanded and unified. At no more than 200 kilometres north to south and 130 kilometres east to west, despite its size, its climate and topography are diverse, ranging from a cool and mountainous highveld to a hot and dry lowveld. The population is primarily ethnic Swazis whose language is Swati and they established their kingdom in the mid-18th century under the leadership of Ngwane III, the present boundaries were drawn up in 1881. After the Anglo-Boer War, Swaziland was a British protectorate from 1903 until 1967 and it regained its independence on 6 September 1968. The country is a monarchy, ruled by iNgwenyamaiNgwenyama Mswati III since 1986. He is head of state and appoints the prime ministers. Elections are held five years to determine the House of Assembly majority. The current constitution was adopted in 2005, Swaziland is a developing country with a small economy. Its GDP per capita of $9,714 means it is classified as a country with a lower-middle income, as a member of the Southern African Customs Union and Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, its main local trading partner is South Africa. Swazilands currency, the lilangeni, is pegged to the South African rand, Swazilands major overseas trading partners are the United States and the European Union. The majority of the employment is provided by its agricultural. Swaziland is a member of the Southern African Development Community, the African Union, the Commonwealth of Nations, the Swazi population faces major health issues, HIV/AIDS and, to a lesser extent, tuberculosis are serious challenges. As of 2013, Swaziland has a life expectancy of 50 years. The population of Swaziland is fairly young with an age of 20.5 years. The present population growth rate is 1. 195%, Swaziland is well known for its culture. Umhlanga, held in August/September and incwala, the kingship dance held in December/January, are the nations most important events, artifacts indicating human activity dating back to the early Stone Age, around 200,000 years ago, have been found in the Kingdom of Swaziland. Prehistoric rock art paintings date from c.25,000 BC, the earliest known inhabitants of the region were Khoisan hunter-gatherers
3.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
4.
Ethnologue
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Ethnologue, Languages of the World is a web-based publication that contains information about the 7,099 living languages in its 20th edition, which was released in 2017. The publication is well respected and widely used by linguists, Ethnologue is published by SIL International, a Christian linguistic service organization with an international office in Dallas, Texas. Ethnologue follows general linguistic criteria, which are based primarily on mutual intelligibility, shared language intelligibility features are complex, and usually include etymological and grammatical evidence that is agreed upon by experts. These lists of names are not necessarily complete, in 1984, Ethnologue released a three-letter coding system, called an SIL code, to identify each language that it described. This set of codes significantly exceeded the scope of other standards, e. g. ISO 639-1, the 14th edition, published in 2000, included 7,148 language codes. In 2002, Ethnologue was asked to work with the International Organization for Standardization to integrate its codes into an international standard. The 15th edition of Ethnologue was the first edition to use this standard and this standard is now administered separately from Ethnologue according to rules established by ISO, and since then Ethnologue relies on the standard to determine what is listed as a language. e. A language with which no-one retains a sense of ethnic identity, in December 2015, Ethnologue launched a soft paywall, users in high-income countries who want to refer to more than seven pages of data per month must buy a paid subscription. Ethnologues 18th edition describes 228 language families and six typological categories, in 1986, William Bright, then editor of the journal Language, wrote of Ethnologue that it is indispensable for any reference shelf on the languages of the world. In 2008 in the journal, Lyle Campbell and Verónica Grondona said, Ethnologue. has become the standard reference. However, he concluded that, on balance, Ethnologue is a comprehensive catalogue of world languages. Starting with the 17th edition, new editions of Ethnologue are to be published every year, linguasphere Observatory Register Glottolog Lists of languages List of language families Martin Everaert, Simon Musgrave, Alexis Dimitriadis, eds. The Use of Databases in Cross-Linguistic Studies, linguistic Genocide in Education-or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights. Evaluating language statistics, the Ethnologue and beyond
5.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
6.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
7.
Uvular consonant
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Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and the symbol for the voiced fricative is used instead. Uvular affricates can certainly be made but are rare, they occur in some southern High-German dialects, as well as in a few African, uvular consonants are typically incompatible with advanced tongue root, and they often cause retraction of neighboring vowels. Uvular consonants are found in many African and Middle-Eastern languages, most notably Arabic. In parts of the Caucasus mountains and northwestern North America, nearly every language has uvular stops, two uvular Rs are found in north-western Europe. It was once thought that they spread from northern French, the voiceless uvular stop is transcribed as in both the IPA and SAMPA. It is pronounced somewhat like the velar stop, but with the middle of the tongue further back on the velum. The voiced equivalent of, is much rarer and it is like the voiced velar stop, but articulated in the same uvular position as. Few languages use this sound, but it is found in Persian and in several Northeast Caucasian languages and it may also occur as an allophone of another uvular consonant - in Kazakh, the voiced uvular stop is an allophone of the voiced uvular fricative after the velar nasal. The voiceless uvular fricative is similar to the velar fricative. It is found instead of in some dialects of German, Spanish, uvular flaps have been reported for Kube and for the variety of Khmer spoken in Battambang. The Tlingit language of the Alaskan Panhandle has ten uvular consonants, in featural phonology, uvular consonants are most often considered to contrast with velar consonants in terms of being and. Prototypical uvulars also appear to be, since palatalized consonants are, the appearance of palatalized uvulars in a few languages such as Ubykh is difficult to account for. According to Vaux, they hold the features, the last being the distinguishing feature from a palatalized velar consonant. The uvular trill is used in dialects of French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, as well as sometimes in Modern Hebrew. As with most trills, uvular trills are often reduced to a single contact, unlike other uvular consonants, the uvular trill is articulated without a retraction of the tongue, and therefore doesnt lower neighboring high vowels the way uvular stops commonly do. Several other languages, including Inuktitut, Abkhaz, Uyghur and some varieties of Arabic, have a voiced uvular fricative, in Lakhota the uvular trill is an allophone of the voiced uvular fricative before /i/. Uvularization Place of articulation List of phonetics topics Guttural R Ladefoged, Peter, Maddieson, the Sounds of the Worlds Languages
8.
Click consonant
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Clicks are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the tsk. tsk. or tut-tut used to express disapproval or pity, used to spur on a horse, and the clip-clop. Sound children make with their tongue to imitate a horse trotting, technically, clicks are obstruents articulated with two closures in the mouth, one forward and one at the back. The enclosed pocket of air is rarefied by an action of the tongue. Click consonants occur at five places of articulation. IPA represents a click by placing the assigned symbol for the place of click articulation adjacent to a symbol for a sound at the rear place of articulation. The IPA symbols are used in writing most Khoisan languages, but Bantu languages such as Zulu typically use Latin ⟨c⟩, ⟨x⟩ and ⟨q⟩ for dental, lateral, the easiest clicks for English speakers are the dental clicks written with a single pipe, ǀ. They are all sharp squeaky sounds made by sucking on the front teeth, a simple dental click is used in English to express pity or to shame someone, and sometimes to call an animal, and is written tsk. in American English and tut. in British English. Curiously, in Italian this sound means no used as an answer to a direct question, next most familiar to English speakers are the lateral clicks written with a double pipe, ǁ. They are also sounds, though less sharp than ǀ. A simple lateral click is made in English to get a horse moving, then there are the labial clicks, written with a bulls eye, ʘ. These are lip-smacking sounds, but without the pursing of the found in a kiss. The above clicks sound like affricates, in that they involve a lot of friction, the other two families are more abrupt sounds that do not have this friction. Like a cork being pulled from an empty bottle and these sounds can be quite loud. Finally, the clicks, ǂ, are made with a flat tongue. Clicks occur in all three Khoisan language families of southern Africa, where they may be the most numerous consonants, to a lesser extent they occur in three neighbouring groups of Bantu languages—which borrowed them, directly or indirectly, from Khoisan. These sounds occur not only in borrowed vocabulary, but have spread to native Bantu words as well, some creolized varieties of Afrikaans, such as Oorlams, retain clicks in Khoekhoe words. Three languages in East Africa use clicks, Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania, and Dahalo and it is thought the latter may remain from an episode of language shift
