Colloquial Zulu is an easy-to-use and up-to-date guide to the Zulu language. Specially written for self-study or class use, the course offers you a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Zulu. No prior knowledge of the language is required. What makes Colloquial Zulu your best choice in language learning? It’s interactive – it has lots of exercises for regular practice. It’s clear – it has concise grammar notes. It’s practical – it has useful vocabulary and a pronunciation guide . It’s complete – it includes an answer key and reference section. Whether you’re a business traveller or you work for an NGO, whether you’re studying to teach or are looking forward to a holiday – if you’d like to get up and running with Zulu, this rewarding course will take you from complete beginner to confidently putting your language skills to use in a wide range of everyday situations. This course is also ideal for an institution-based setting with its clear language pedagogy, cultural information and notes. Accompanying audio material, recorded by native speakers, is available free online at www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. The audio material will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

"Why are you learning Zulu?" When Mark Sanders began studying the language, he was often asked this question. In Learning Zulu, Sanders places his own endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South African history, Zulu became a battleground for issues of property, possession, and deprivation. Sanders combines elements of analysis and memoir to explore a complex cultural history. Perceiving that colonial learners of Zulu saw themselves as repairing harm done to Africans by Europeans, Sanders reveals deeper motives at work in the development of Zulu-language learning—from the emergence of the pidgin Fanagalo among missionaries and traders in the nineteenth century to widespread efforts, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to teach a correct form of Zulu. Sanders looks at the white appropriation of Zulu language, music, and dance in South African culture, and at the association of Zulu with a martial masculinity. In exploring how Zulu has come to represent what is most properly and powerfully African, Sanders examines differences in English- and Zulu-language press coverage of an important trial, as well as the role of linguistic purism in xenophobic violence in South Africa. Through one person's efforts to learn the Zulu language, Learning Zulu explores how a language's history and politics influence all individuals in a multilingual society.

The strikingly unrestricted syntactic distribution of nouns in many Bantu languages often leads to proposals that syntactic case does not play an active role in the grammar of Bantu. This book offers a different conclusion that the basis of Zulu that Bantu languages have not only a system of structural case, but also a complex system of morphological case that is comparable to systems found in languages like Icelandic. By comparing the system of argument licensing found in Zulu to those found in more familiar languages, Halpert introduces a number of insights onto the organization of the grammar. First, while this book argues in favor of a case-licensing analysis of Zulu, it locates the positions where case is assigned lower in the clause than what is found in nominative-accusative languages. In addition, Zulu shows evidence that case and agreement are two distinct operations in the language, located on different heads and operating independently of each other. Despite these unfamiliarities, there is evidence that the timing relationships between operations mirror those found in other languages. Second, this book proposes a novel type of morphological case that serves to mask many structural licensing effects in Zulu; the effects of this case are unfamiliar, Halpert argues that its existence is expected given the current typological picture of case. Finally, this book explores the consequences of case and agreement as dissociated operations, showing that given this situation, other unusual properties of Bantu languages, such as hyper-raising, are a natural result. This exploration yields the conclusion that some of the more unusual properties of Bantu languages in fact result from small amounts of variation to deeply familiar syntactic principles such as case, agreement, and the EPP.