Xhosa is a Nguni language, a subgroup that also includes Zulu; Swati; and Ndebele (the latter spoken in Zimbabwe and parts of the Republic of South Africa); all four languages are closely related and mutually intelligible.
They are generally not considered as dialects of the same language for cultural, historical, and political reasons. For instance, Zulu and Xhosa have their own identities in the view of individual speakers of the respective languages. The Nguni languages are part of a much larger related group of Southeastern Bantu languages that includes Sotho (Northern, Southern, and Tswana), Tsonga, Venda, and Inhambane (Chopi and Tonga) along with the Nguni languages. For the most part the Southeastern Bantu languages are spoken within the Republic of South Africa; Tswana is predominantly spoken in Botswana and in the "homeland" of Bophuthatswana; Inhambane languages are found in southern Mozambique. In turn all these languages just mentioned are related to the Shona dialect cluster, predominantly spoken in Zimbabwe. This group, inclusive of all the above, is also known as Narrow Bantu 'S'. As a Bantu language, Xhosa is related to a large number of languages spoken throughout much of Eastern, Southern, and Central Africa from South Africa to Cameroon in the west and Kenya in the east.
Xhosa speaking peoples or their immediate Nguni speaking forbearers inhabited coastal regions of southeastern Africa since before the sixteenth century. Their language is the most southerly spoken Bantu language in the African continent. Their entry into southern Africa came along with a much more extensive and larger movement of Bantu speaking peoples who over a millennium had been moving south along the East African coast and through Central Africa. Upon their entry into southern Africa they encountered Khoisan speaking peoples and adopted some of their vocabulary and elements of their phonologies, in particular the well known "clicks" of southern African languages. It is only Southern Bantu languages that possess these sounds; other Bantu languages do not. In the modern period, Xhosa has also borrowed from Afrikaans and English.
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