official languages of South Africa
South Africa has 11 official spoken languages, corresponding roughly to the most widely-spoken languages in the country. (There is also South African Sign Language.) There are the colonial languages, English and Afrikaans; then there are the nine official languages which are indigenous to South Africa, which are all Bantu languages. Listed below with the proportion of South Africans who speak them natively, and grouped together by language subfamily where possible, the 11 official languages are:
- Western Germanic
- Afrikaans (13.5%)
- English (9.6%)
- Nguni
- Zulu, aka. isiZulu (22.7%)
- Xhosa, aka. isiXhosa (16%)
- Swati, aka. siSwati (2.5%)
- Ndebele, aka. isiNdebele (2.1%)
- Sotho-Tswana
- Northern Sotho, aka. Sepedi or Pedi (9.1%)
- Tswana, aka. Setswana (8%)
- Sotho, aka. Sesotho (7.6%)
- Tsonga, aka. Xitsonga (4.5%)
- Venda, aka. Tshivenda (2.4%)
As of 2011, 1.6% of South Africans’ native language was none of the above, nor SA Sign Language. Some of these languages include immigrant languages like Portuguese, Tamil or Hindi, as well as less widely-spoken African languages. A very high proportion of South Africans are multilingual. English serves more or less as the lingua franca of South Africa, and is the dominant language of media and the government.
A map showing the dominant languages across different parts of South Africa. As for what the colours represent: teal is Afrikaans, red is Xhosa, blue is Zulu, lime green is Sotho, pink is Tswana, orange is Northern Sotho, light purple is Southern Ndebele, dark purple is Swazi, dark yellow is Tsonga, light green is Venda, and light yellow is English (only little dots where various cities are).
