On 9 November 2022, the Department of Basic Education(DBE), in collaboration with a range of stakeholders, funders and international benchmarking specialists, launched the Reading Benchmark for the Sesotho languages, Afrikaans and English as First Additional Language. The efforts by the DBE and the abovementioned stakeholders have resulted in the development of early-grade reading benchmarks for the Nguni and Sesotho-Setswana language groups, as well as for Afrikaans and English as First Additional Language.

The Sesotho languages, which include Sepedi, Setswana and Sesotho, were represented by experts in those specific languages. Reading and literacy data from selected primary schools in several provinces where the languages are spoken was gathered and analysed by the DBE in collaboration with the language experts and other essential stakeholders. Stemming from the Early Grade Reading Assessment(EGRA) project, which has been running for some time, the launch presented an opportunity to report on each language based on the data gathered and analysed.

Drs Connie Makgabo (Humanities Education) and Refilwe Ramagoshi (African Languages) discussed the linguistic features of the three Sesotho languages, which all developed from the African Niger-Congo language family and are included among the 11 official languages of South Africa. Some of the more prominent features of these languages are that they are all written disjunctively and have a rich agglutinating and complex morphology.

They are all tonal languages with seven basic vowels and two semivowels, with a combination of vowels in some words. However, they can be clearly differentiated. In conclusion, the Sesotho languages display many similarities regarding vowels and simple and complex consonants, with notable differences between some consonants. While the Sesotho language uses all the letters of the alphabet but does not use the circumflex sign/diacritic mark, Sepedi and Setswana do not have all letters of the alphabet.