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Native speakers of Afrikaans comprise a higher percentage of the population in the Northern Cape than in any other province. The Northern Cape's four official languages are Afrikaans, Tswana, Xhosa, and English. Minorities speak the other official languages of South Africa and a few people speak indigenous languages such as Nama and Khwe.
Tsotsitaal in its original form as "Flaaitaal" was based on Afrikaans, a colonial language derived from Dutch, which is the most widely spoken language in the western half of the country (Western and Northern Cape). Afrikaans is spoken as first language by approximately 61 percent of whites and 76 percent of Coloured people. [6]
English: Map showing the dominant home languages in the Northern Cape province of South Africa, according to Census 2001 at the "Subplace" level. In this context, a language is dominant if it more than 50% of the population in an area speak it at home, or more than 33% speak it and no other language is spoken by more than 25%.
Afrikaans is the lingua franca in the Northern Cape because the majority of the province's population (mostly Coloureds) speak it as a first language. Only the north-eastern areas have more blacks than Coloureds and as well as far fewer white people.
(On this page a regional language has parentheses next to it that contain a region, province, etc. where the language has regional status.) National language A language that uniquely represents the national identity of a state, nation, and/or country and is so designated by a country's government; some are technically minority languages.
The Free State is the only province in which native Sotho-speakers form a majority of the population. It is also the province with the third-highest proportion of Afrikaans speakers, after the Western Cape and the Northern Cape. [8] Sesotho is the dominant home language in most of the province.
Xhosa is spoken as a first language by approximately 8 million people and as a second language in South Africa, particularly in Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Northern Cape and Gauteng, and also in parts of Zimbabwe and Lesotho. [9]
The name of the language comes directly from the Dutch word Afrikaansch (now spelled Afrikaans) [n 4] meaning 'African'. [12] It was previously referred to as 'Cape Dutch' (Kaap-Hollands or Kaap-Nederlands), a term also used to refer to the early Cape settlers collectively, or the derogatory 'kitchen Dutch' (kombuistaal) from its use by slaves of colonial settlers "in the kitchen".