In The Dream House, Bheki and Beauty speak Zulu to each other, and Beauty speaks it to Richard when they are alone. We will briefly look at this language, as it is important to a sufficient understanding of these characters.
Zulu, or isiZulu, is a Southern Bantu language, native to South Africa. It is a member of the Nguni subgroup of Bantu, of the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family. It is one of the eleven official languages of South Africa. Currently, there are about 11.6 million native speakers (most in the KwaZulu-Natal province) and 15.7 million people who speak it as a second language. It is also spoken in Lesotho, Malawi, Botswana, and Mozambique.
Many Zulu words are borrowed from other languages such as Afrikaans and English. There are three types of click sounds, and most words end in a vowel. The word “Zulu” means “Sky,” and is the name of the ancestor who founded the royal line in 1670. Standard Zulu, or “deep Zulu,” is different from that of urban Zulu. The former tends to be more purist, whereas urban Zulu speakers borrow more words from English.
Christian missionaries in the 19th century were the first to devise a way to write Zulu, which had only been an oral language prior; the first Zulu Christian booklet, Incwadi Yokuqala Yabafundayo, was issued in 1837-38. The first Zulu Bible version was translated between 1845 and 1883, and the first novel published in Zulu, Insila kaShaka, came out in 1930.
