The Xhosa people, or Xhosa-speaking people are a Bantu ethnic group native to South Africa. They are the second largest ethnic group in South Africa and are native speakers of the isiXhosa language.
Xhosa graduates at Zonnebloem College in 1860, Cape Town, Cape Colony
Xhosa village in Eastern Cape.
An illustration of a group of Xhosa people by Thomas Baines (illustrated in 1848).
Xhosa spearman
Xhosa, formerly spelled Xosa and also known by its local name isiXhosa, is a Nguni language, indigenous to Southern Africa and one of the official languages of South Africa and Zimbabwe. Xhosa is spoken as a first language by approximately 10 million people and as a second language by another 10 million, mostly in South Africa, particularly in Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Northern Cape and Gauteng, and also in parts of Zimbabwe and Lesotho. It has perhaps the heaviest functional load of click consonants in a Bantu language, with one count finding that 10% of basic vocabulary items contained a click.
Trilingual government building sign in Afrikaans, English and Xhosa
Sign outside the AmaZink township theatre restaurant in Kayamandi welcoming visitors in Xhosa
English missionary Henry Hare Dugmore helped translate the Bible into Xhosa in 1859
Nelson Mandela was a Xhosa and was a member of the royal family of the Thembu tribe
