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.
Contents
What do black people in South Africa speak?
About 70% of South Africans speak one of the Bantu languages. There is an almost perfect correlation between race and language: those who speak a Bantu language as a mother tongue are black African, and there are few blacks who do not speak a Bantu language.
Is Afrikaans a black language?
Afrikaans is a southern African language. Today six in 10 of the almost seven million Afrikaans speakers in South Africa are estimated to be black.Like several other South African languages, Afrikaans is a cross-border language spanning sizeable communities of speakers in Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe.
What is the most spoken black language in South Africa?
isiZulu
By comparison, black Africans speak a much larger variety of languages, StatsSA said. Besides the two most commonly spoken languages, isiZulu (31.1%) and isiXhosa (18.2%), notable sub-groups of black African individuals also spoke Sepedi (12.4%), Setswana (11.1%) and Sesotho (9.7%).
Are Afrikaans white?
Afrikaners make up approximately 5.2% of the total South African population, based upon the number of white South Africans who speak Afrikaans as a first language in the South African National Census of 2011.
Distribution.
| Province | Mpumalanga |
|---|---|
| Afrikaners | 164,620 |
| % Afrikaners | 83.5% |
| All whites | 197,078 |
Is Afrikaans a dying language?
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.
What is black South African English?
Black South African English, or BSAE, is spoken by individuals whose first language is an indigenous African tongue. BSAE is considered a “new” English because it has emerged through the education system among second-language speakers in places where English is not the majority language.
Are South Africans multilingual?
South Africa is a multilingual, multicultural space. As is the case for many other countries in Africa, it has a number of official languages – 11.For instance, the country’s courts operate with English as the sole and official language of record. In higher education, too, English tends to be the dominant language.
Do they speak Afrikaans in South Africa?
Afrikaans and English are the only Indo-European languages among the many official languages of South Africa. Although Afrikaans is very similar to Dutch, it is clearly a separate language, differing from Standard Dutch in its sound system and its loss of case and gender distinctions.
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.
How much of Africa’s population is black?
The 2010 midyear estimated figures for the other categories were Black at 78.4%, White at 10.2%, Coloured at 8.8%, Indian/Asian at 2.6%. The first census in South Africa in 1911 showed that whites made up 22% of the population; it declined to 16% in 1980.
Do South Africans 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.
Which race was first in South Africa?
The Khoisan were the first inhabitants of southern Africa and one of the earliest distinct groups of Homo sapiens, enduring centuries of gradual dispossession at the hands of every new wave of settlers, including the Bantu, whose descendants make up most of South Africa’s black population today.
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”.
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).
Are Dutch and Afrikaans similar?
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 language family is Afrikaans?
| Afrikaans | |
|---|---|
| Native to | South Africa, Namibia |
| Ethnicity | Afrikaners Basters Cape Coloureds Cape Malay Griqua |
| Native speakers | 7.2 million (2016) 10.3 million L2 speakers in South Africa (2002) |
| Language family | Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Weser-Rhine Germanic Low Franconian Dutch (Hollandic dialect) Afrikaans |
How many white South African are there?
White South Africans
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 2020 estimate: 4,679,770 (7.8% of South Africa’s population) | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Throughout South Africa, but mostly concentrated in urban areas. Population by provinces, as of the 2011 census: | |
| Gauteng | 1,914,000 |
What percentage of South Africa is Zulu?
24.7%
Languages of South Africa
| Languages of South Africa (2017) | |
|---|---|
| Languages | percent |
| Zulu | 24.7% |
| Xhosa | 15.6% |
| Afrikaans | 12.1% |
What language do white South African speak?
White South Africans form two main language groups. More than half of them are Afrikaans speakers, the descendants of mostly Dutch, French, and German settlers.
How do you say hello in the 11 South African languages?
Predominantly spoken in KwaZulu-Natal, Zulu is understood by at least 50% of South Africans.
- Hello! – Sawubona! (
- Hello! – Molo (to one) / Molweni (to many)
- Hello! – Haai! / Hallo!
- Hello – Dumela (to one) / Dumelang (to many)
- Hello – Dumela.
- Hello – Dumela (to one) / Dumelang (to many)
- Hello – Avuxeni.
- Hello – Sawubona.
