- 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.
Reach summary
What one translation into Southern Sotho covers, across every market that speaks it.
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.
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%
South Africa, the largest single territory, 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. It counts whole economies, not the speakers' share, so read it as an upper bound.
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 has no total.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| South AfricaZA | 7.9% | 4.8M | 3.7M | minority or diaspora |
| LesothoLS | 98% | 2.2M | 1.1M | official |
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, but they are why total reach runs higher than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means no World Bank internet figure, not zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation.
Writing system
Not in the curated engineering table, which covers about 80 languages.
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.