Tswana, also known native name Setswana,[a] is a Bantu language spoken in and indigenous to Southern Africa by about 8.2 million people.

The three South African provinces with the most speakers are Gauteng (circa 11%), Northern Cape, and North West (over 70%).

Until 1994, South African Tswana people were notionally citizens of Bophuthatswana, one of the bantustans of the apartheid regime.

The Setswana language in the Northwest Province has variations in which it is spoken according to the ethnic groups found in the Tswana culture (Bakgatla, Barolong, Bakwena, Batlhaping, Bahurutshe, Bafokeng, Batlokwa, Bataung, and Batswapong, among others); the written language remains the same.

[1] The first European to describe the language was the German traveller Hinrich Lichtenstein, who lived among the Tswana people Batlhaping in 1806 although his work was not published until 1930.

He changed his mind later, and in a publication from 1882, he noted that the Northern and Southern Sotho languages were distinct from Tswana.

[5] Solomon Plaatje, a South African intellectual and linguist, was one of the first writers to extensively write in and about the Tswana language.

Tswana also has three click consonants, but these are only used in interjections or ideophones, and tend only to be used by the older generation, and are therefore falling out of use.