Ditema tsa Dinoko isiBheqe soHlamvu | |
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Script type | |
Languages | Southern Bantu, Swazi |
Related scripts | |
Parent systems | |
Ditema tsa Dinoko (Sesotho for "Ditema syllabary"), also known as ditema tsa Sesotho, is a constructed writing system (specifically, a featural syllabary) for the siNtu or Southern Bantu languages (such as Sesotho, Setswana, IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, SiSwati, SiPhuthi, Xitsonga, EMakhuwa, ChiNgoni, SiLozi, ChiShona and Tshivenḓa). It is also known by its IsiZulu name isiBheqe soHlamvu, and by various other names in different languages.[1][2] It was developed in the 2010s from antecedent ideographic traditions of the Southern African region. Its visual appearance is inspired by these, including the traditional litema arts style.[3] It was developed between 2014 and 2016 by a group of South African linguists and software programmers with the goal of creating a denser writing system to avoid the slowness in reading caused by the word length and visual homogeneity of Southern Bantu languages written in the Roman alphabet.[4][5] As of 2023,[update] no proposal has been made to encode the script in Unicode, the text encoding standard designed to support all of the world's major writing systems.[6]
The Ditema / Isibheqe syllabary has the capacity to represent the full phonological range of these sintu languages (in the Nguni, Sotho-Tswana, Venḓa, Tsonga and Tonga-Inhambane groups) consistently under one orthography.[7] This includes languages that are unstandardised in the Latin alphabet such as the East Sotho languages (Sepulana, Sekutswe and Hipai), or the Tekela languages, which, with the exception of SiSwati, are not official languages. Orthographic support for these languages is for instance evidenced in the ingungwana grapheme, which indicates vowel nasality — a feature of Tekela languages.