Editing Xhosa language (section)

==History==
{{main|Xhosa people}}
{{expand section|date=August 2019}}
[[Image:Henry Hare Dugmore (ca. 1890).jpg|thumb|English missionary [[Henry Hare Dugmore]] helped translate the Bible into Xhosa in 1859]]
[[Image:Nelson Mandela.jpg|thumb|[[Nelson Mandela]] was a Xhosa and was a member of the royal family of the Thembu tribe]]

Xhosa-speaking people have inhabited coastal regions of southeastern Africa since before the 16th century. They refer to themselves as the ''[[Xhosa people|amaXhosa]]'' and their language as ''isiXhosa''. Ancestors of the Xhosa migrated to the east coast of Africa and came across [[Khoisan]]-speaking people; "as a result of this contact, the Xhosa people borrowed some Khoisan words along with their pronunciation, for instance, the click sounds of the Khoisan languages".<ref name="XhosaAboutWorldLanguages">{{Cite web |url=http://aboutworldlanguages.com/xhosa |title=Xhosa |website=About World Languages |language=en-US |access-date=2017-12-11}}</ref> The Bantu ancestor of Xhosa did not have clicks, which attests to a strong historical contact with a [[Khoisan language]] that did. An estimated 15% of Xhosa vocabulary is of Khoisan origin.<ref name="xho" />

[[John Bennie (missionary)|John Bennie]] was a Scottish Presbyterian missionary and early Xhosa linguist. Bennie, along with John Ross (another missionary), set up a printing press in the [[Tyhume River|Tyhume]] Valley and the first printed works in Xhosa came out in 1823 from the [[Lovedale (South Africa)|Lovedale]] Press in the Alice region of the Eastern Cape. But, as with any language, Xhosa had a rich history of oral traditions from which the society taught, informed, and entertained one another. The first Bible translation was in 1859, produced in part by [[Henry Hare Dugmore]].<ref name="xho" />