Tsotleho Mohale was addressing a group of people gathered on a mountainside still damp from an intense rainstorm that morning. The peaks on the other side of the steep valley were draped in cloud. Mohale was speaking in siPhuthi, a language spoken by just a few thousand people in parts of southern Lesotho and the north of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, about the plants he used and the ailments he cured as a traditional healer.
The questions came from Sheena Shah, a British linguist, and were translated into siPhuthi by Mohale’s grandson Atlehang. Shah’s German colleague Matthias Brenzinger was filming the exchange. The two academics have been travelling regularly to Daliwe, a remote valley in Lesotho about 15 miles from the nearest paved road, since 2016, working with local interpreters and activists to document siPhuthi.
Observing the encounter was a senior healer, Mathabang Hlaela. Initially she had refused to be interviewed, wary of foreigners stealing knowledge that she had been amassing since 1978. But after briefly disappearing into her corrugated iron hut, she re-emerged adorned with beads – a thick belt, headbands and multistringed necklaces – and declared that she too wanted to be interviewed in her native language.
While siPhuthi remains under threat from the dominant Sesotho in Lesotho and Xhosa across the border in South Africa, it has undergone a remarkable revival.
Malillo Mpapa, a shop owner, started working with Shah and Brenzinger as a paid language consultant in 2019. She recalled how receptive ebaPhuthi people were to the project. “When we made recordings, they were so impressed and they were proud and willing to help,” said Mpapa, who lives in the Sebapala valley neighbouring Daliwe.
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Tsotleho Mohale, a traditional healer, stands outside his home; Mathabang Hlaela, also a healer, watches a recording just made of her
Mpapa, 34, expressed her own pride in having worked on the project and improved her siPhuthi. “It helped me a lot, because … I was interested in how to write and speak siPhuthi correctly,” she said.
About half of the world’s 7,000 languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people. While intergenerational transmission is more important than absolute numbers in language survival, about half of languages are at risk of extinction by the end of the century, according to Unesco.
Linguists argue that language death is a tragedy. “Languages represent thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding and living that should form part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human,” Ross Perlin, a co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, wrote in his book Language City.
While at the University of Cape Town, Brenzinger and Shah heard about siPhuthi and realised there had been no academic research on it since the 1990s. In January 2016, they set out on a month-long trip to find out where siPhuthi was spoken and whether communities would be open to working together.
“We really wanted not to have any agenda before this trip, because we thought it’s also important to gain trust,” said Shah, now a researcher at the University of Hamburg.
The pair hiked two days to one village and found just three siPhuthi speakers, two elderly. Many people hadn’t heard of the language or were reluctant to admit that they spoke it.
The researchers heard that the “purest” siPhuthi was in the Daliwe valley, home to about 1,000 people, mostly crop and livestock farmers. There, they found children speaking it. They became members of Libadla le baPhuthi, an association campaigning for the official recognition of siPhuthi in Lesotho and political representation for the community.
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EbaPhuthi men wait for an audience with Bereng Nkuebe, the chief of Daliwe valley, outside the chief’s home in Ha Sekhobe village
Since then, the researchers have worked with about 20 local people such as Mpapa to record more than 40 hours of siPhuthi video, on everything from marriages and funerals to poems, recipes and life stories.
From 2019 to 2022 they hosted workshops with about six ebaPhuthi each time to decide on an orthography – an agreed way of writing siPhuthi. They plan to publish a 3,000-word dictionary next year and are conducting a census of speakers.
Outside Daliwe, in the town of Alwyn’s Kop, six of the linguists trained by Shah and Brenzinger are now translating the Bible into siPhuthi, in written and audio form. The project started in 2019 with Bible stories recorded on to solar-powered audio devices and distributed among siPhuthi speakers. The group has finished translating the books of Genesis, Romans and Luke and are partway through Matthew.
For the deeply Christian community, having “the word of God” in their own language is important. The translators also noted other benefits. Phuthi Mats’abisa, who grew up in Alwyn’s Kop, said: “Before the Bible, I thought [siPhuthui] was going to perish.” He added: “At first, I felt like a nobody. Now I have pride in my own identity.”
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Mats’eliso Tsekoa, a translator, records a portion of an oral siPhuthi Bible translation in the Bible translation group’s mobile sound booth in Alwyn’s Kop
Despite the growing confidence in siPhuthi, it is still endangered outside of the Daliwe valley by Sesotho and Xhosa, said Brenzinger, a research fellow at the University of the Free State in South Africa. “There is always this notion of English being a killer language,” he said. “In most cases in Africa, it’s not English or French that are threatening other languages, it’s the dominant national languages.”
SiPhuthi was given a boost in August when it was made an official language of Lesotho, alongside Xhosa and sign language. It was the culmination of decades of campaigning, said Libadla le baPhuthi’s president, Letzadzo Kometsi.
“I feel like my mission is accomplished,” said Kometsi, a law lecturer at the National University of Lesotho. He acknowledged, though, that the government needed to allocate resources and effort to implement siPhuthi’s new legal status, including in schools.
Community members said being forced to learn in English and Sesotho, the previous sole official languages, led to children struggling in school and the ebaPhuthi’s subsequent struggles to break out of poverty. Children needed to be taught in siPhuthi in the first years of school, they said, something that is backed up by research showing that mother-tongue education improves learning outcomes.
Bongani Peete, a teacher at Daliwe primary, said he had to punish children he caught speaking siPhuthi, as mandated by the school’s rules. “I feel so bad,” he said, looking downcast. “I need everyone to be allowed to express his or herself in his or her language.”
It was news to him that siPhuthi was now an official language. “It is very good indeed,” he said, adding that he would now no longer punish children for speaking their mother tongue.
