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South Africa Holiday: Tribes, Nations & Languages
The most widely spoken of South Africa's eleven
official languages are
isiZulu, isiXhosa,
Afrikaans and English. The others - isiNdebele,
sePedi,
Sesotho,
seTswana, siSwati, tshiVenda, and
xiTsonga - are also spoken in large parts of the
country.
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“If you talk to a
man in a language that he understands, that goes to
his head. If you talk to him in his language, that
goes to his heart.”
Nelson R. Mandela
Despite the diversity of the South African
languages, it is possible to begin to understand
this complex society by viewing language groups
as essentially the same as ethnic groups. This is
because most South Africans
consider one of the eleven official languages to be
their first language, and most people acquire their
first language as part of a kinship or
ethnic group.
The word "tribe" assumed pejorative connotations
under apartheid when it was used to create 'bantustans'.
In post-apartheid South Africa, many people reclaimed their ethnic heritage and
acknowledged pride in their ancestry.
Nine of South Africa's official languages are
Bantu languages - a large branch of the Niger-Congo
language family found across
sub-Saharan Africa. Four major subgroups of the
Bantu languages
are found in South Africa - Nguni,
Sotho-Tswana,
Tsonga and Venda.
The Nguni languages account for four South
African languages: isiZulu,
isiXhosa, siSwati, and
isiNdebele. Together they represent more than 18
million South Africans.
About nine million speak
Sesotho and two million
seTswana. More than two million speak xiTsonga and
just under one million speak tshiVenda.
Lekker Links
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Afrikaans is a 17th-century variant of
Dutch which developed in southern Africa. It
was recognised as a separate language in
the 19th century after a significant
literature began to develop.
Although most of the English spoken in
South Africa is spoken by non-whites, the
term "English speakers" is
normally used to
identify non-Afrikaner whites,
largely because this group shares no other
common cultural feature.
Almost two-thirds of these "English
speakers" trace their ancestry to England, Scotland,
Wales, or Ireland, but a few arrived from
the Netherlands, Germany or France and
joined the English-speaking community in
South Africa for a variety of social and
political reasons.
Of the one million people of
Asian descent in South Africa, all but about
20,000 are of Indian descent. Most speak
English as their first language, although
many also speak Tamil or Hindi, and some
speak Afrikaans as a second or third
language.
The Khoisan languages are not included
in the 11 official languages in South African. They are characterized by
"click" sounds not found elsewhere in
Africa, although these "clicks" have been
incorporated into many words in
isiXhosa and a
few in isiZulu.
Most of the remaining
Khoisan speakers
are believed to be San, living in the
Kalahari Desert (Kgalagadi) region in the
Northern Cape
and North-West
provinces. Although there is
no accurate count of their numbers, it is
generally believed that larger numbers of
San live in Botswana and Namibia.
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