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Learn about the diversity and history of languages in South Africa, including the official and unofficial ones. Find out the most common languages spoken as first or second languages, and how they are distributed geographically and demographically.
Afrikaans is a West Germanic language spoken in South Africa and other countries in Southern Africa. It evolved from the Dutch vernacular of the Dutch settlers and slaves in the Cape Colony, and has a large degree of mutual intelligibility with Dutch.
Afrikaans and/or Dutch are co-official languages in several dependent entities. At certain administrative levels in the Kingdoms of the Netherlands and Belgium the Dutch language is a co-official language. The same happens with Afrikaans in South Africa. [citation needed]
Afrikaners are a Southern African ethnic group descended from Dutch settlers who arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. They speak Afrikaans, a language derived from Dutch, and have a distinct identity and political history in South Africa.
Learn the 11 official names of South Africa in each of its 12 official languages, including English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, and more. See also the former name in Dutch and the country code ZA.
Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia. Learn about the mutual intelligibility, lexical and grammatical differences, and spelling simplifications between the two languages.
Geographical distribution of Afrikaans in Namibia. South African census figures suggest a growing number of first language Afrikaans speakers in all nine provinces, a total of 6.85 million in 2011 compared to 5.98 million a decade earlier. [1] 2001 Namibian census reported that 11.4% of Namibians had Afrikaans as their home language.
Other large West African languages are Yoruba, Igbo, Akan and Fula. Major Horn of Africa languages are Somali, Amharic and Oromo. Lingala is important in Central Africa. Important South African languages are Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Venda, Tsonga, Swazi, Southern Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans. [36]