South Africa has 11
official languages. They are Zulu,
Xhosa, Afrikaans, Northern Sotho, Tswana, English, Southern Sotho,
Tsonga, Swazi, Venda and Southern Ndebele. Less than one percent of
South Africans speak any other language as their home language.
Most South Africans can speak more than one language. Prior to
1994, South Africa had only two official languages, namely English
and Afrikaans.
The English version of the South African constitution refers to the
languages by the names in those languages, namely
isiZulu,
isiXhosa,
Afrikaans,
Sepedi (referring to
Northern Sotho),
Setswana,
English,
Sesotho (referring to Southern Sotho),
Xitsonga,
Siswati,
Tshivenda and
isiNdebele (referring to Southern
Ndebele).
In South Africa, Southern Ndebele is simply called Ndebele, as most
speakers of Northern Ndebele live in Zimbabwe. The 1993 version of
the Constitution referred to Northern Sotho as Sesotho sa Leboa but
in the 1996 version the language is called Sepedi. Different
government departments and official bodies use different terms to
denote Northern Sotho.
The main language of commerce and politics is English,
notwithstanding the fact that South Africans often take pride in
using their own languages for any purpose. The highest number of
affluent speakers are Afrikaans and English. At various times in
South Africa's history, either English or Afrikaans were labelled
as the "language of the oppressor".
Etymologically speaking, the official languages include two
West-Germanic languages
(
English and
Afrikaans) and nine
Bantu languages. Four are of these are
Nguni languages (Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi
and Ndebele) and three are
Sotho-Tswana languages (Northern
Sotho, Southern Sotho and Tswana). Tsonga is a
Tswa-Ronga language.
Language demographics
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). English is only the sixth-most common
home language in the country, but is understood in most urban areas
and is (mainly for political reasons) the dominant language in
government and the media.
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.
As can be
seen from the accompanying maps, the nine indigenous African
languages of South Africa can be divided into two geographical
zones, with Nguni languages being predominant in the south-eastern
third of the country (Indian Ocean coast) and Sotho languages being
predominant in the northern third of the country located further
inland, as also in Botswana
and Lesotho
.
Gauteng
is the most
linguistically heterogeneous province, with roughly equal numbers
of Nguni, Sotho and Indo-European language speakers. This
has resulted in the spread of an urban argot,
Tsotsitaal, in large urban townships in the
province.
Afrikaans, a language derived from
Dutch, is the most widely spoken language in
the western half of the country (
Western and
Northern
Cape). It is spoken not only by a majority of whites but also
by about 90 percent of
Coloured (
multiracial) people in the country. Afrikaans is
also spoken widely across the centre and north of the country, as a
second (or third or even fourth) language by Black South Africans
living in farming areas.
Other significant languages spoken in South Africa
Other languages spoken in South Africa, though not mentioned in the
Constitution, include:
- Fanagalo, Khoe, Lobedu ,
Nama, Northern Ndebele , Phuthi , San (Khoisan/Khoesan) languages, sign language and Tamil (less spoken).
South African Sign
Language is a distinct though incompletely emerged national
standard language which also subsumes a cluster of
semi-standardised dialects. The Constitution mentions "sign
language" in the generic sense rather than, as is widely believed,
South African Sign Language specifically.
Lobedu has been variously claimed to be a dialect
of Northern Sotho and an autonomous language.
Fanagalo is a pidgin often used as a mining lingua
franca.
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.
These non-official languages may be used in limited semi-official
use where it has been determined that these languages are
prevalent. More importantly, these languages have significant local
functions in specific communities whose identity is tightly bound
around the linguistic and cultural identity that these non-official
SA languages signal.
The
fastest growing non-official language is Portuguese - first spoken
by white, black, and mestiço settlers and
refugees from Angola
and Mozambique
after they won independence from Portugal
and now by
more recent immigrants from those countries again - and
increasingly French, spoken by immigrants and refugees from
Francophone Central Africa.
More
recently, 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
.
Extinct languages
Constitutional provisions
Chapter 1 (Founding Provisions), Section 6 (Languages) of the
Constitution of South
Africa is the basis for government
language policy. The English text of the
constitution signed by president
Nelson
Mandela on 16 December 1996 curiously contains the names of the
languages in the language itself rather than
English.
Controversy surrounds the use of
Sepedi as opposed to
Sesotho sa Leboa (which was the wording in the 1994
interim constitution) in the text. The spelling of Venda is also
incorrectly rendered as
Tshivenda instead of the correct
Tshivenḓa:
Census
The 2001
census recorded the following home
language speakers:
| Language |
Speakers |
% |
| Zulu |
10,677,000 |
23.8% |
| Xhosa |
7,907,000 |
17.6% |
| Afrikaans |
5,983,000 |
13.3% |
| Northern Sotho |
4,209,000 |
9.4% |
| Tswana |
3,677,000 |
8.2% |
| English |
3,673,000 |
8.2% |
| Sotho |
3,555,000 |
7.9% |
| Tsonga |
1,992,000 |
4.4% |
| Swati |
1,194,000 |
2.7% |
| Venda |
1,022,000 |
2.3% |
| Ndebele |
712,000 |
1.6% |
| Other languages |
217,000 |
0.5% |
| Total |
44,820,000 |
100.0% |
References
- http://www.info.gov.za/documents/constitution/83cons.htm
-
http://www.info.gov.za/documents/constitution/1996/96cons1.htm
- http://www.info.gov.za/documents/constitution/93cons.htm
-
http://mailman.obsidianonline.net/pipermail/translate-announce/2006q4/000003.html
-
http://www.dac.gov.za/chief_directorates/NLS/Website%20MULTILINGUAL%20NATURAL%20SCIENCES%20Sotho%20pdf%2019%20%20Nov%202008.pdf
-
http://www.tvsa.co.za/default.asp?blogname=news&articleID=4931
-
http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/language-policy-and-oppression-south-africa
- http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/content.aspx?audioID=941
See also
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