With about seven million native speakers in South Africa, or 13.5% of the population, it is the third most spoken language in the country. Estimates of the total number of Afrikaans speakers range between 15 and 23 million.
| Afrikaans | |
|---|---|
| Native speakers | 7.2 million (2016) 10.3 million L2 speakers in South Africa (2002) |
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Is Afrikaans the most spoken language in South Africa?
The Western Cape is home to the most Afrikaans speakers (2.8 million) – while Joburg has the most English speakers (1.6 million).
Language in South Africa.
| # | Language | Native Speakers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | IsiZulu | 11.58 million |
| 2 | IsiXhosa | 8.15 million |
| 3 | Afrikaans | 6.85 million |
| 4 | English | 4.89 million |
Is Afrikaans a dying language in South Africa?
About the Afrikaans Language. The Afrikaans language is one of South Africa’s official languages and a large proportion of the local population uses it as their first or second language.Some believe that Afrikaans is a dying language, however, it remains spoken all over the country and respected for its origins.
Do more people speak Afrikaans or English in South Africa?
StatsSA
More than three-quarters (77.4%) of coloured individuals speak Afrikaans at home while 20.1% use English. More than three-fifths (61,2%) of white South Africans speak Afrikaans and 36.3% speak English. By comparison, black Africans speak a much larger variety of languages, StatsSA said.
Do black South Africans understand Afrikaans?
Most black South Africans do not speak Afrikaans, although many learn it at school. For older generations, the language still symbolises the brutality of apartheid regime and a time they would rather forget.
Is Afrikaans easy to learn?
Afrikaans is actually quite simple to learn, and many language learners consider it one of the easiest languages to master. Most Germanic languages have two or even three genders, but Afrikaans, like English, uses a singular gender.
Which language is more popular in South Africa?
isiZulu
As of 2018, the languages most commonly spoken by individuals inside of South African households were isiZulu at 25.3 percent, isiXhosa at 14.8 percent and Afrikaans at 12.2 percent respectively.
Can a Dutch person understand Afrikaans?
Although Afrikaans is a daughter of Dutch, Dutch speakers might take some time to understand the language but they can understand Afrikaans.One of the major differences between the two languages lies in grammar and morphology of Afrikaans. The spelling is also different from the Dutch standard.
Why did the Afrikaners hate the British?
Some Afrikaners don’t like to speak English.The English were also losing because they were getting very bad sunburns from the hot South African sun. They didn’t take this into account when they came to fight a war in South Africa. This is why some Afrikaners call English Whites Rooineks (Rednecks).
Is Afrikaans a white language?
Afrikaans was constructed as a “white language”, with a “white history” and “white faces”.
Why do Coloureds speak Afrikaans?
In the Eastern Cape, they make up 8.3% of the population. Most speak Afrikaans, as they were generally descendants of Dutch and Afrikaner men and grew up in their society. About twenty percent of the Coloured speak English as their mother tongue, mostly those of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
What language do South Korea speak?
Korean
How many Zulus are in South Africa?
Zulu people (/ˈzuːluː/; Zulu: amaZulu) are an Nguni ethnic group in Southern Africa. The Zulu people are the largest ethnic group and nation in South Africa with an estimated 10–12 million people living mainly in the province of KwaZulu-Natal.
Zulu people.
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| Mozambique | 6,000 |
| Languages | |
| Zulu | |
| Religion |
Is Afrikaans a beautiful language?
“Afrikaans is helluva nice language,” he says. “It is so expressive and flows so beautifully.Olga Sema, a Motswana who traverses the country for the ATKV to promote Afrikaans among non-mother tongue communities, says the “perception around the world is that Afrikaans is the language of the apartheid oppressors”.
Do Coloured people speak Afrikaans?
According to the census, over three-quarters of the coloured population speaks Afrikaans as a home language. Afrikaans is first language of 3.4-million coloured South Africans, or about seven to eight in every 10 (75.8%) coloured people.
How close is Afrikaans to Dutch?
90 to 95%
As an estimated 90 to 95% of Afrikaans vocabulary is ultimately of Dutch origin, there are few lexical differences between the two languages; however, Afrikaans has a considerably more regular morphology, grammar, and spelling.
What is the hardest language to learn?
Mandarin
Mandarin
As mentioned before, Mandarin is unanimously considered the toughest language to master in the world! Spoken by over a billion people in the world, the language can be extremely difficult for people whose native languages use the Latin writing system.
Is Afrikaans or Dutch easier?
Afrikaans is easier than Dutch because it’s grammar simplified. Dutch is more complicated. Once you can speak and write Dutch you will be able to read Afrikaans newspapers and will be able to have a conversation with an Afrikaans person if you speak slow.
Is Afrikaans the easiest language for English speakers?
Afrikaans is one of the easiest languages for English speakers because both Afrikaans and English belong to the West Germanic language family. Afrikaans language is not inflective, i.e. even with little vocabulary, you can build up your own sentences.
Which South African language is the easiest to learn?
Swahili is said to be the easiest African language for an English speaker to learn. It is heavily influenced by Arabic and Indo-European languages such as Portuguese, German, English, and French. It’s one of the few sub-Saharan African languages that have no lexical tone, just as in English.
Does South Africa speak English?
Most South Africans speak English, which is fairly ubiquitous in official and commercial public life. The country’s other lingua franca is Zulu.The Sotho languages – Tswana, Sotho sa Leboa and Sotho – also have much in common. Many of South Africa’s linguistic groups share a common ancestry.
