Zulu Language - Grammar

Grammar

Some of the main grammatical features of Zulu are:

• Constituent word order is subject–verb–object.
• Morphologically, it is an agglutinative language.
• As in other Bantu languages, Zulu nouns are classified into fifteen morphological classes (or genders), with different prefixes for singular and plural. Various parts of speech that qualify a noun must agree with the noun according to its gender. These agreements usually reflect part of the original class that it is agreeing with. An example of this is the use of the class 'aba-':

Bonke abantu abaqatha basepulazini bayagawula.

All the strong people of the farm are felling (trees).

Here, the various agreement that qualify the word 'abantu' (people) can be seen in effect.

• Its verbal system shows a combination of temporal and aspectual categories in their finite paradigm. Typically verbs have two stems, one for Present-Indefinite and another for Perfect. Different prefixes can be attached to these verbal stems to specify subject agreement and various degrees of past or future tense. For example, in the word uyathanda ("he loves"), the Present stem of the verb is -thanda, the prefix u- expresses third-person singular subject and -ya- is a filler used in short sentences.

Suffixes are also put into common use to show the causative or reciprocal forms of a verb stem.

• Most property words (words which are encoded as adjectives in English) are represented by things called relatives, such is the sentence umuntu ubomvu ("the person is red"), the word ubomvu (root -bomvu) behaves similarly to a verb and uses the agreement prefix u-, but there are subtle differences, for example, it does not use the prefix ya-.