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Ethnologue lists the classifications of southern Ndebele as: Niger-Congo, Atlantic-Congo, Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern, Narrow Bantu, Central, S, Sotho-Tswana (S.30), Sotho, Northern
Southern Ndebele mainly in Transvaal, South Africa.
According to information compiled from Ethnologue:
Ownby (personal communication, 1986) notes that "there are three distinct dialects of Ndebele: Northern Transvaal Ndebele (on the verge of extinction), Southern Transvaal Ndebele and that spoken in Zimbabwe." (Webbook)
J.A. Louw (personal communication, 1982) reports (Ndzunda-Manala) Ndebele is "a Zulu dialect insofar as it is mutually intelligible with Zulu." (Webbook)
Ethnologue notes that Ndebele of South Africa and Ndebele of Zimbabwe are different. The latter (Northern Ndebele) is "close to Zulu."
Ndebele in South Africa is one of the 11 official languages.
Ndebele has a standardized orthography. (Webbook) It is Latin-based.
According to information from the Geonames "Unicode test page...: South Ndebele alphabet" http://www.geonames.de/alphmq.html#nbl , the alphabet is the same as in English (verify).
A text sample for Ndebele (without clarity as to which kind) is shown on the "Language Museum" site: http://www.language-museum.com/n/ndebele.htm
The South African language site "Batho Portal" http://www.sediba.org.za/ has a section on & in isiNdebele.
The OpenOffice suite of software applications has been localized in Ndebele (South Africa) by Translate.org.za. See http://translate.org.za/content/view/17/54/
Ndebele, South (South Africa):
The Open Knowledge Network has a Ndebele version of its project software [seeking more info]. http://www.openknowledge.net/
Dwyer, David (1997), Webbook of African Languages, http://www.isp.msu.edu/AfrLang/hiermenu.html (page on "Ndebele," http://www.isp.msu.edu/AfrLang/Ndebele-root.html )
SIL International, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, "Ndebele [South Africa]," http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=nbl
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, "Southern Ndebele language," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Ndebele_language
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