The Department of Basic Education (DBE), in collaboration with a range of stakeholders, launched the Reading Benchmark for the Sesotho Languages, Afrikaans, and English as First Additional Language at its DBE offices on 9 November 2022. 

The Sesotho language family, which comprises Sepedi, Setswana and Sesotho, was represented by language experts in those specific languages. The language experts worked in collaboration with the DBE and other important stakeholders to gather reading and literacy data in selected primary schools in a number of provinces where the languages are spoken.

Stemming from the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) project, which has been running for a while now, the launch reported on each language based on the data that were gathered and analysed.

Drs Connie Makgabo (Humanities Education) and Refilwe Ramagoshi (African Languages) presented the linguistic features of the Sesotho languages. These three languages originate from the same language family in Africa, namely the Niger–Congo family. They form part of the 11 official languages of South Africa. Some of the more prominent features that these languages have are that they are written disjunctively. While they all have a rich agglutinating and complex morphology, they are also tonal languages. Furthermore, they all have seven basic vowels, with two semi-vowels displaying a combination of vowels in some words.

The differences between these languages vary throughout, which is what differentiates them from each other. In conclusion, the Sesotho languages display a lot of similarities with vowels, and simple and complex consonants, with some differences prevailing among some of the consonants. The Sesotho language does not have the circumflex sign/diacritic mark. Both Sepedi and Setswana do not have all letters of the alphabet, while Sesotho has all of them.