- ISO 639
st- Its own name
- Sesotho
- Script
- not catalogued
- Direction
- —
Southern Sotho
Southern Sotho (Sesotho) is spoken by 7M people across 2 territories in CLDR, and is official nationally in 1 of them. South Africa holds 69% of its speakers. One translation covers all of it, which is why localization is planned by language and launched by market.
At a glance
What one translation into Southern Sotho buys, before anyone argues about which market to enter first.
Speakers
7M
South Africa 69% · Lesotho 31%
First and second language speakers, summed across the 2 territories CLDR records. The bar splits them by territory, largest first.
Online speakers
4.9M
0%100%
70% of speakers, once each territory's speaker count is scaled by its World Bank internet rate. Territories with no internet figure contribute nothing, so this is a floor.
Concentration
69%
0%100%
The largest single territory, South Africa, holds 69% of speakers. Spread out enough that regional wording and currency will come up.
Territories
2
1 where it is official nationally, 1 where at least one person in five speaks it. The rest are diaspora and minority populations, which CLDR does record.
Reachable GDP
$869B
Combined GDP of every territory where the language appears at all. An upper bound on the market, not a revenue forecast: it counts the whole economy, not the speakers' share of it.
Translation rate
1.00×
1.0×1.6×+
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate used across this site's estimators.
Where Southern Sotho is spoken
Every territory CLDR records, largest speaker count first. Share is of that territory's own population, so the column does not add up to anything.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| South AfricaZA | 8% | 4.8M | 3.7M | minority or diaspora |
| LesothoLS | 98% | 2.2M | 1.1M | official |
The long tail matters. CLDR does record diaspora populations, so a language usually appears in more territories than its home markets, at small shares. Those rows rarely justify a launch on their own. They are why a language's total reach is larger than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means the territory has no World Bank internet figure, and it does not mean zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation: the writing system, the grammar your message format has to survive, and what the words cost.
Writing system
Not in the curated engineering table, which covers the ~80 languages product teams most often evaluate.
Plural categories
Unknown. Ask Intl.PluralRules for the real answer before scoping a catalog.
Rate index
1.00×
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate.