The acquisition of Sesotho

This chapter focuses on the acquisition of Sesotho, a southern Bantu language spoken by approximately four million speakers, about half of whom reside in the country of Lesotho, the others living in South Africa. After a brief grammatical sketch of Sesotho, it reviews the acquisition literature and discusses the specifics of acquisition in the data section. The chapter summarizes results from the preliminary investigation of Sesotho word-order development. It describes a more extensive discussion of the acquisition of noun class prefixes and the nominal agreement system in Sesotho and related languages. What is interesting is that appropriate marking of possessive and demonstrative agreement forms is well in place before nouns are consistently marked with noun class prefixes. In the noun class system, subject–verb agreement, adjectival agreement, possessives, demonstratives, independent pronouns, relatives, and object clitics all “agree” in noun class with their head noun.