Ditema tsa Dinoko

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 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 with the goal of creating a more linguistically efficient writing system, to remedy the slowness in reading the highly agglutinative languages of the region, due to numerous multigraphs used in their standard orthographies in Latin script. Languages written in the script include ones that have no standardised Latin orthography, such as Eastern Sotho languages like sePulana and the majority of the Tekela languages. A diacritic that indicates vowel nasality, known as ingungwanyana, is provided specifically for the Tekela languages. As with the Latin orthographies, there is no provision for tone, which can generally be inferred from context.