Zulu has a Subject Verb Object word order according to the WALS database. Nouns come before the adjectives that describe them. Nouns come after apositions, making the apositions prepositions. Word order is fixed for the most part, although the order of demonstratives and nouns is mixed.
Verbs inflect for person, number, and tense. The options for person are first, second, or third person. The possible number inflections are singular or plural. The possible tenses are present, imperative, infinitive, subjunctive, stative, perfect, and preterite. Zulu is agglutinative, meaning that each of the tenses is marked by a prefix or suffix on the verb stem.
Nouns come in 15 genders, commonly referred to instead as noun classes. Some examples are names and surnames (class 1A), doer nouns like painter (class 1), abstract nouns like happiness (class 14), gerunds like eating (class 15), and loan words borrowed from other languages (classes 9 and 5). There is no case marking for nouns, only for pronouns.
All plural nouns must have a plural prefix. There is no inclusive/exclusive distinction in either pronouns or verbs. Both singular and non-singular 3rd person pronouns have gender distinctions. Pronouns do not have politeness distinctions. Pronouns are case marked by one prefix attached to the verb for direct and indirect objects and a different prefix attached to the verb for subjects.
Zulu is a tonal language, meaning that the same sounds spoken in a different tone have different meanings. The Zulu language is spoken with unique sounds like clicks as well as all commonly found consonants and the five standard vowels.
The Zulu language is part of the Nguni language group, which is a subset of the Bantu language group. There are about 650 Bantu languages. Bantu languages are spoken by a large number of people in sub-Saharan Africa. Nguni languages are spoken primarily in southern Africa.
Zulu is spoken in eastern South Africa by ethnic Zulus. There are 10 million native speakers, 95% of whom live in South Africa. There are 15 million additional speakers for which Zulu is a secondary language. Half of all South Africans understand Zulu, and a quarter speak it at home.
Other people in the area are exposed to English, Dutch, and Afrikaans. All schooling and government proceedings were only in those European languages until 1994. Many Zulu people also speak Afrikaans, English, and other languages from South Africa's 11 official languages.
The Zulu language had no written script until missionaries arrived in South Africa in the mid-19th century. It is now written with a Roman alphabet. J.L. Dube, published the first book in Zulu, called Insila kaShaka, in 1930. During the Apartheid government, official use of Zulu was suppressed, although there were many novels published. After 1994 when the Apartheid government officially ended, there has been a renaissance of TV broadcasts and newspapers in Zulu. Literacy among Zulu speakers was 70% in 1992. Presumably, it has increased since.
Google Translate supports translation to and from Zulu. Here is an example of an English translation of a Zulu Wikipedia article.
This language goes back to or attributed to the ngowayeyiSilo the churches of the King Shaka Zulu . This is due to the impact or the role he played in shaping the nation esasihlukene earlier . Some linguists from the isiZulu language include Xhosa , English and English . SakwaBulawayo region , as reported in Zimbabwe is one of the locales that use this language isiZulu . This is because former tribe sakaBulawayo Mzilikazi moved there at the time of King Shaka Zulu and his forces attacking other nations for the purpose of yokuzifaka under the Kingdom of the heavens ( The Zulu Kingdom ) . KwaZulu - Natal region is known for a number of many of the people of South Africa or in Azaniah ( Azania ).
Two papers written about machine translation into the Zulu language, include "Experiments with syllable-based Zulu-English machine translation" by Friedel Wolff and Gideon Kotze and "Using Resource-Rich Languages to Improve Morphological Analysis of Under-Resourced Languages" by Peter Baumann and Janet Pierrehumbert.
Wolff and Kotze address the challenge of translation into the Zulu morphology, in which complex phrases can be represented as single words. The approach of the authors of this paper was to use syllables instead of words as the tokens in the Zulu corpus.
Baumann and Pierrehumbert identify Zulu as a language that is spoken in a multi-lingual environment with a "resource-rich" language, in this case English. By identifying English loan-words found in Zulu sentences and using the plentiful English language resources, the authors attempted to build up accurate linguistic information about the Zulu language.
There does not seem to be an accessible online Zulu parser or treebank.