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Picture Languages

Ndebele speaking countries

Ndebele is one out of eleven official languages in South Africa and is spoken in 2 other countries as monther tongue by a part of the population.

As a percentage of the total population, the largest share of around 16 percent is in Zimbabwe. A total of about 3.9 million people worldwide speak Ndebele as their mother tongue.
Distribution Ndebele

CountryRegionOfficial languageDistributionTotal
ZimbabweEastern Africano16.2 %2,591,000
South AfricaSouthern Africayes2.1 %1,247,000
BotswanaSouthern Africano1.3 %34,000



Unless otherwise described in the text, this page is about native speakers — not the total number of speakers. How many people understand or speak Ndebele as a subsequently learned language is not the subject of this page. Countries where native speakers make up only a few thousand, or even a few hundred people, or countries with a percentage well below 1% are unlikely to be listed here.