Sesotho (or Southern Sotho) is a language of South Africa and Lesotho. It is the official language of Lesotho and one of South Africa’s 11 official languages. Sesotho belongs to the Niger-Congo language family, and is part of the Southern Bantu sub-group. Tswana and Northern Sotho are its nearest relatives. Like other Southern Bantu languages, Sesotho is agglutinative, meaning that content is expressed by bringing word fragments together (as prefixes and suffixes) to form word groups. An estimated 5 million people speak Sesotho.