What’s the biggest language family in the world? If you’re going by number of speakers, it’s certainly Indo–European, with English, Spanish, French, Hindi, Bengali, and Portuguese—all in the top 10 most widely spoken languages—hailing from the family. But if you’re counting by the number of languages in the family, the title would go to Niger–Congo, with more than 1,500 attested languages. Within this expansive family we find the prominent Bantu subfamily, which accounts for the majority of languages spoken throughout Central, East, and Southern Africa. In fact, the Bantu subfamily could be ranked alongside the macro language families and still come in third place for number of languages.
The most famous Bantu language is Swahili, but that’s only one of roughly 500 to 600. Today, we’re focusing on Lozi, a sizable Bantu language spoken by around 750,000 native speakers primarily in southwestern Zambia. Speakers of Lozi, or Silozi, as they call it, generally reside in Zambia’s Western Province, which encompasses most of the former Barotseland, and Lozi dominates daily life in the province, spoken by roughly two-thirds of the population. At a national level, however, Zambians use English as a lingua franca, and regional languages like Bemba and Nyanja (Chewa) hold much more influence, relegating Lozi to the large list of languages that most translation agencies never touch.
We here at TranslationServices.com are different—we set up our Lozi translation team with pride! If you’d like to see a free quote for our Lozi translation services, get in touch anytime.
Let’s take a closer look at the Lozi language.
Used by around 6% of the Zambian population, Lozi comes from the Sotho–Tswana branch of Bantu languages, making it closely related to Sotho (Sesotho), Northern Sotho (Sesotho sa Leboa), Tswana (Setswana), and Kgalagari (Shekgalagari). It originally developed as a mixture of two other Bantu languages, Luyana and Kololo, when the Kololo, chased out from their native homeland by Zulu expansionism, conquered the Luyana people who already inhabited the region. The result was a type of hybrid language that today is spoken as the natural language of Lozi.
Being a Bantu language, Lozi grammar is complex for an English native speaker. The language is heavily prefixing, and as an agglutinative language, it may glue together long strings of prefixes, creating long words that could appear unwieldy to a learner. Of course, Lozi is also characterized by its use of the famous Bantu noun class system, wherein nouns are divided into a multitude of classes and given prefixes accordingly, which are additionally added to adjectives, verbs, and other words that modify the noun.
Passionate Lozi translators ready to help you with any translation project
If you’re looking for Lozi translation services, you want the best. You want a native-speaking Lozi translator with a wealth of experience that informs their careful and diligent translation work. You want someone whose expertise expands beyond the realm of translation and into the topic your content revolves around, ensuring expert handling of any technical terms that may crop up. You want a translator who’s specialized in the type of translation you need, be that business translation, academic translation, literary translation, localization, or any other type of translation services. That’s exactly what we offer with our Lozi translation services.
Having carefully constructed our Lozi translation team by scouting out Barotseland and the rest of Zambia and selecting the best Lozi translators we could find, we’re confident that we can accommodate all your Lozi translation needs. Our team translates content both from Lozi to English and from English to Lozi, ensuring you have access to the type of translation services you need. Our translators are experienced, knowledgeable, and passionate—everything you need for a great Lozi translation.
You can get started with professional Lozi translation today—just reach out to our team!