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It is a common belief in language studies that the 'word' is the basic unit of language. Bolinger (1963: 113) very aptly asks:Why is it that the element of language which the naïve speaker feels that [they] know best [sic] is the one about which linguistics says the least? To the untutored person, speaking is putting words together, writing is a matter of correct word-spelling and word-spacing, translating is getting words to match words, meaning is a matter of word definitions, and linguistic change is merely the addition or loss or corruption of words. In this article, we investigate the factors that have determined the delimitation of words in a language such as Northern Sotho, which uses the disjunctive system of writing, and consider the implications of the shortcomings of such a writing system vis-à-vis the agglutinating languages of Southern Africa. As Lyons (1968: 194) observes:The word is the unit par excellence of traditional grammatical theory. It is the basis of the distinction which is frequently drawn between morphology and syntax and it is the principal unit of lexicography (or 'dictionary-making'). Dixon and Aikhenvald (2002: 5) have noted that some of the definitions that have been put forward for the term 'word' have been 'horrifying in their complexity and clearly infringe the principle that a definition should not be more difficult to understand than the word it purports to define'. And yet some definitions have been simplistic, such as that of Sapir's (1921: 34), where he states that the word is 'one of the smallest, completely satisfying bits of isolated "meaning" into which the sentence resolves itself'. Such definitions do not assist in providing criteria for deciding on what truly constitutes a word in a given language.The question of what constitutes a word in the African languages has been a controversial issue ever since African languages were committed to writing by the early missionaries, and yet it still remains at the very core of the most recent approaches to linguistic analysis including typological, cognitive and computational linguistics. In fact, as recently as 2002, in the book Word: A crosslinguistic typology, the editors Dixon and Aikhenvald begin their introductory chapter by stating on Abstract: In this article, the issue of the status or nature of the word is revisited with specific reference to languages which employ the disjunctive system of writing. Although it is generally assumed that the 'word' represents the basic unit of language, it is shown that the factors underlying the delimitation of this unit remain a debatable issue. Traditional tests in determining word boundaries are shown to be inconsistent in their application and such shortcomings have not only hampered a clear understanding of the nature of the word in languages which employ the disjunctive system of writing, but have also blurred a more universal approach to the definition of the 'word' vis-à-vis other languages within the same family, which employ the conjunctive system of writing.

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