- ISO 639
zu- Its own name
- isiZulu
- Script
- not catalogued
- Direction
- —
Zulu
Zulu (isiZulu) is spoken by 15M people across 4 territories in CLDR, and is official nationally in 0 of them. South Africa holds 97% of its speakers.
Reach summary
What one translation into Zulu covers, across every market that speaks it.
Speakers
15M
South Africa 97% · Lesotho 2% · Eswatini 1%
First and second language speakers, summed across the 4 territories CLDR records. The bar splits them by territory.
Online speakers
11.6M
0%100%
77% 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
97%
0%100%
One market with a diaspora: South Africa holds 97% of speakers. Take the tone and conventions from there.
Territories
4
0 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
$917B
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 Zulu 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 | 24% | 14.5M | 11.4M | major |
| LesothoLS | 14% | 311.9K | 161.5K | minority or diaspora |
| EswatiniSZ | 6.8% | 77.4K | 49.1K | minority or diaspora |
| MalawiMW | 0.4% | 71.8K | 13.6K | minority or diaspora |
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.