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South Africa has 12 official languages and a multilingual population fluent in at least two. IsiZulu and isiXhosa are the largest languages, while English is spoken at home by only one in 10 people – most of them not white. Mary Alexander • 11 November 2024.
The home language of most people in KwaZulu-Natal is, unsurprisingly, isiZulu. In the Eastern Cape it’s isiXhosa. Around half the people of the Western Cape and Northern Cape speak Afrikaans. In Gauteng and Mpumalanga, no single language dominates.
South Africa has nine provinces, each with its own history, landscape, population, languages, economy, cities and government. They are the Eastern Cape, the Free State, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, the Northern Cape, North West and the Western Cape.
A third of black South Africans speak isiZulu as a first language, and 20% speak isiXhosa. Three-quarters of coloured people speak Afrikaans, and 86% of Indian South Africans speak English. Sixty percent of white people speak Afrikaans, and 30% speak English. But it’s a multilingual country.
Mixed with over a dozen African languages for two centuries, spiced by imports from British, Dutch and Portuguese colonies, South African English has its own rich, varied and weird flavour.
Each of South Africa’s 11 languages has a fascinating vocabulary, with some words and phrases influenced by other languages, and many unique to that language. Learn a little South African with these animations.
Black South Africans spoke their own languages. These had already been ignored in their education. English had long been the medium of instruction – their second language – and was a language most urban young black people were at least familiar with.
South Africa has a population of 56.5-million people, according to 2017 estimates. The 2011 census puts it at 51.5-million – the fourth-largest population in Africa and the 25th-largest in the world. Black South Africans make up around 81% of the total, coloured people 9%, whites 8% and Indians 3%.
Graphics and animations that give you a more accurate insight into South Africa's people, languages and economy.
English is most common in public life, but is only spoken as a home language by 9.6% of South Africans. The other languages are Sesotho sa Leboa (spoken by 9.1% of the population), Setswana (8%), Sesotho (7.6%), Xitsonga (4.5%), siSwati (2.5%) and Tshivenda (2.4%).