- Official language in
- Eswatini, South Africa
- Script
- Latin
- Speakers
- 1.3M (2011)
Where it's spoken
Siswati is one of the official languages of South Africa. In Eswatini, the constitution names siSwati and English as the official languages.
In South Africa's national census, about one and a third million people gave Siswati as their first language, and more than a quarter of the people in Mpumalanga province did so.
Sources
- Swaziland's Constitution of 2005 — Comparative Constitutions Project — Section 3(2)
- Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (as amended, 2012 revision) — Section 6(1)
- Statistics South Africa (2012). Census 2011: Census in brief. Report No. 03-01-41 — Tables 2.5 and 2.6, SiSwati row
Script & pronunciation
A data-resource description lists Siswati among four Nguni languages of South Africa, together with isiNdebele, isiXhosa and isiZulu, that have a conjunctive orthography. This app's Siswati cards show the Siswati text only; none of them carries a separate romanization. One card shows the country name written eSwatini, and its note says that the initial e- is part of the name and is always written with a lowercase e.