Venda, known to its speakers as Tshivenda, is a Bantu language and one of South Africa's official languages. Most speakers live in the north of Limpopo province, near the Zimbabwean border, and smaller Venda-speaking communities live in Zimbabwe itself. First-language speakers number over a million. Within the Bantu family, Tshivenda occupies a somewhat solitary position: it is not mutually intelligible with its Sotho or Nguni neighbours and shows historical links with the Shona varieties of Zimbabwe. The language is written in the Latin alphabet, but its standard orthography uses several letters with diacritical marks to represent dental consonants, giving written Venda a distinctive look among South African languages. Missionary work at the end of the nineteenth century produced the first written materials.
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