Ditema tsa Dinoko

Common card · No. 489543

Ditema or Bheqe syllabics, known in full as Ditema tsa Dinoko in Sotho (pronounced [ditʼɪma t͜sʼa dinʊːkʼʊ]), isiBheqe soHlamvu in Zulu (pronounced [isibʱɛᵏǃʼɛ sɔɬaːɱb̪̊vʱu]), and sometimes Xiyinhlanharhu xa Mipfawulo or Xifungho xa Manungu in Tsonga and Luṱhofunḓeraru lwa Mibvumo or Vhuga ha Madungo in Venḓa, is a featural syllable-based writing system created for use with the siNtu languages. It was developed in the 2010s from the preeminent ideographic traditions of Southern Africa, including litema mural art of Lesotho, the related isiNdebele tradition of ukugwala ("to write", "to draw", "to paint traditional ideographic mural art"), and other symbolic crafts, like the regional beadwork containing ideograms and morphograms, which in isiZulu tradition are called amabheqe. As of 2026, no proposal has been made to encode the script in Unicode. The script is designed for the phonologies of the siNtu languages at large. It was created as a syllabic system, to suit the highly agglutinative...

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