South Africa is a multilingual country. Besides the 11 officially recognised languages, a number of other languages - African, European, Asian and more - are spoken as the country lies at the crossroads of southern Africa.
The country's Constitution guarantees equal status to 11 official languages to cater for the country's diverse peoples and their cultures. The eleven official languages of South Africa are as follows (with the name used for each language, by speakers of that language, in brackets):
Afrikaans (Afrikaans), English, Ndebele (isiNdebele), Northern Sotho (Sesotho sa Leboa), Sotho (Sesotho), Swati (siSwati), Tsonga (Xitsonga), Tswana (Setswana), Venda (Tshiven?a), Xhosa (isiXhosa), Zulu (isiZulu).
The majority of South Africans speak a language from one of the two principal branches of the Bantu languages represented in South Africa: the Sotho-Tswana branch (Sotho, Northern Sotho, Tswana), or the Nguni branch (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Ndebele). For each of the two groups, the languages within that group are for the most part intelligible to a native speaker of any other language within that group.
Venda and Tsonga are neither Nguni nor Sotho-Tswana languages.
Language distribution
The most common language spoken at home by South Africans is Zulu (24 percent speak Zulu at home), followed by Xhosa (18 percent), and Afrikaans (13 percent).
Sepedi is spoken by 9% of the population, English, Setswana and Sesotho each by 8% while the remaining four official languages are spoken at home by less than 5% of the population each.
English is only the sixth-most common home language in the country, but is understood in most urban areas and is the dominant language in government and the media.
The languages you will hear most frequently spoken in South Africa depend on where in the country you are. Predominant languages by province (Census 2001 figures, rounded off) are:
- Eastern Cape - isiXhosa (83%), Afrikaans (9%)
- Free State - Sesotho (64%), Afrikaans (12%)
- Gauteng - isiZulu (21%), Afrikaans (14%), Sesotho (13%), English (12%)
- KwaZulu-Natal - isiZulu (81%), English (13%)
- Limpopo - Sepedi (52%), Xitsonga (22%), Tshivenda (16%)
- Mpumalanga - siSwati (31%), isiZulu (26%), isiNdebele (12%)
- Northern Cape - Afrikaans (68%), Setswana (21%)
- North West - Setswana (65%), Afrikaans (7%)
- Western Cape - Afrikaans (55%), English (19%), isiXhosa (23%)
Other Languages
Other languages spoken in South Africa and mentioned in the Constitution are the Khoi, Nama and San languages, sign language, Arabic, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Portuguese, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telegu and Urdu.
Significant numbers of immigrants from Europe, elsewhere in Africa, and the Indian subcontinent means that a wide variety of other languages can also be found in parts of South Africa. In the older immigrant communities there are: Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Polish, Portuguese, Tamil, Urdu, Yiddish, and smaller numbers of Dutch, French and German speakers.
Of the listed non-official languages, the fastest growing are Portuguese - first spoken by white settlers, then settlers and refugees from Angola and Mozambique after they won independence from Portugal and now by more recent immigrants from those countries again - and� French, spoken by immigrants and refugees from Francophone Central Africa.
Finally, more recently, many thousands of speakers of North, Central and West African languages have arrived in South Africa, mostly in the major cities, especially in Johannesburg and Pretoria, but also Cape Town and Durban.
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