Learn Setswana Through Topics You Actually Care About

LingoBear creates short Setswana passages on topics you choose. Tap any word for an instant English translation and build your vocabulary as you read. Bantu language, national language of Botswana and one of South Africa's 12 official languages, Latin script with distinctive tl, kg, kh consonants, ~14M speakers.

Tap any word for instant translation

Every word in your Setswana reading passage is clickable. Get English translations and grammar help — useful for parsing Sotho-Tswana noun classes.

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Type any topic and LingoBear generates a fresh Setswana reading passage — from kgotla community meetings to Botswana football news.

What is Tswana and where is it spoken?

Tswana (Setswana) is a Bantu language of the Sotho-Tswana branch, the national language of Botswana and one of South Africa's 12 official languages. About 14 million people speak it across Botswana, South Africa (mostly in the North West, Free State and Northern Cape), Namibia and Zimbabwe. The closely related Sesotho and Sepedi are mutually intelligible at a basic level.

What grammar features does Setswana have?

Setswana uses around 18 noun classes whose prefixes drive concord throughout the sentence. The Latin orthography uses some distinctive digraphs: tl for a lateral affricate /tɬ/, kg for an aspirated velar /kʰ/, and kh for an aspirated palatal /tʃʰ/. Verbs are agglutinative with subject, object, tense, aspect and verbal extensions (-isa- causative, -ela- applicative, -wa- passive).