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Southern Sotho (also known as Sesotho or Sotho proper) is classified as: Niger-Congo, Atlantic-Congo, Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern, Narrow Bantu, Central, S, Sotho-Tswana (S.30), Sotho, Southern
(Webbook and Ethnologue)
Southern Sotho / Sotho proper is spoken in the south of South Africa, and is the predominant language of Lesotho. (Webbook, with modifications)
A map from Wikipedia showing "Areas in which significant proportions of the population are Sesotho mother tongue speakers" follows (reproduced under a GNU Free Documentation License):
According to Ethnologue:
Although Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, and Tswana are considered to be three separate languages they are largely interintelligible. (Webbook and Ethnologue)
Language varieties of this language include: Sekgolokwe, Sekwena, Serotse (Selozi) and Setlokwa. (Sesotho.web.za)
Sotho is an official languages in South Africa and Lesotho.
According to Ethnologue:
Sesotho is written with the Latin alphabet. Apparently this orthography uses no diacritics or extended characters [verify!]
According to Sesotho.web.za, the standard orthographies in South Africa and Lesotho differ on some details. This is reflected in spelling conventions (see http://www.sesotho.web.za/dipolelo.htm ).
A unified orthography for Sesotho, Sepedi and Tswana was proposed by J.M. Nhlapo in 1945, but never adopted. (Sesotho.web.za)
"The first written form of Sesotho was devised by Thomas Arbousset, Eugene Casalis and Constant Gosselin, French missionaries of the Paris Evangelical Mission who arrived in Lesotho in 1833." (Omniglot)
Two sites give examples of the alphabet (without explanation whether this applies to Lesotho or South Africa):
A sample text is shown on the "Language Museum" site: http://www.language-museum.com/s/sotho-southern.htm
A standard Latin font useful for English will suffice.
An English keyboard or the South African keyboard http://translate.org.za/content/view/24/41/ can be used (verify re the English keyboard)
The South African language site "Batho Portal" http://www.sediba.org.za/ has a section on & in "Sesotho."
Universal Declaration of Human Rights: http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/sso.htm
The OpenOffice suite of software applications has been localized in Sesotho by Translate.org.za. See http://translate.org.za/content/view/17/54/ . Not aware of any effort to make a version for Lesotho.
Translate.org.za http://translate.org.za
AfricanLanguages.com "Sesotho (South Sotho)" page http://www.africanlanguages.com/sesotho/
This is a cross-border Southern African languages that could have localized versions for Lesotho as well as South Africa. It is not clear how much of a difficulty the different spelling conventions would pose, though these should not be any greater than what is encountered with crossvborder languages elsewhere. In any event, if they are based on a common version - in this case the one done by Translate.org.za - that would make it easier for the broader user community.
Dwyer, David (1997), Webbook of African Languages, http://www.isp.msu.edu/AfrLang/hiermenu.html (page on "Sotho/Tswana," http://www.isp.msu.edu/AfrLang/Sotho_root.html )
Omniglot, "Southern Sotho (seSotho)," http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sesotho.htm
Sesotho.web.za, "General Introduction," http://www.sesotho.web.za/nalane.htm
______, "Variants of Sesotho," http://www.sesotho.web.za/dipolelo.htm
SIL International, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, "Sotho, Southern," http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=sot
SIL International, "ISO 639 Code Tables," http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp
U.S. Library of Congress, "ISO 639.2: Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages: Alpha-3 codes arranged alphabetically by the English name of language," http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php
Wikipedia, "Sotho language," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sotho_language
