Wiktionary:About Sotho

This is a Wiktionary policy, guideline or common practices page. Specifically it is a policy think tank, working to develop a formal policy. Policies – Entries: CFI - EL - NORM - NPOV - QUOTE - REDIR - DELETE. Languages: LT - AXX. Others: BLOCK - BOTS - VOTES.

Sotho (Sesotho) is an agglutinative Bantu language spoken in Southern Africa. This page details standard practice to be followed on all Sotho pages.

Dialects and spellings

Wiktionary treats Sotho and Northern Sotho as separate languages, as well as separating Lozi, Tswana, and Kgalagadi. This page only concerns Sotho proper, and by default describes the standard language. Dialectal words within Sotho can be added, but should be marked as such.

The orthography used on Wiktionary follows the standard used in South Africa. Entries using the spellings from Lesotho should have their definition line be {{standard spelling of|WORD|from=Lesotho|lang=st}}, where WORD is the South African spelling of the word in question. The usual disjunctive word division is used, per the South African standard.

Tones should be marked in headword lines, using the acute (´) to mark high tones and leaving low tones unmarked. Entries when linked to or mentioned should not show tone unless there is reason to do so (for example, to distinguish words whose only difference is tone). Tones should be marked in example sentences, but quotes that did not have tone marked originally should not be modified.

Attestation

Only one use or mention is necessary to attest a word in Sotho, provided the source is primarily in Sotho or concerned with the language specifically. Any spelling can be used to attest a word in the orthography used here as described above, but for the purpose of attesting any spellings that deviate from this standard, only that exact spelling counts.