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Under South Africa's Constitution of 1996, Afrikaans remains an official language, and has equal status to English and nine other languages. The new policy means that the use of Afrikaans is now often reduced in favour of English, or to accommodate the other official languages.
The most common language spoken as a first language by South Africans is Zulu (23 percent), followed by Xhosa (16 percent), and Afrikaans (14 percent). English is the fourth most common first language in the country (9.6%), but is understood in most urban areas and is the dominant language in government and the media.
Languages. Afrikaans – South Africa’s Language Heritage. Afrikaans, one of South Africa's 11 official languages, is spoken by the majority of the population as either a first or second language.
17 kwi 2024 · 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.
22 paź 2023 · South Africa’s constitution recognises 11 official languages: Sepedi (also known as Sesotho sa Leboa ), Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa and isiZulu. For centuries South Africa’s official languages were European – Dutch, English, Afrikaans.
Afrikaans is a Low Franconian West Germanic language descended from Dutch and spoken mainly in South Africa and Namibia. In 2013 there were about 17 million speakers in South Africa, where Afrikaans is one of the Statutory national languages, and an official language in nine provinces.
1 lut 2024 · Afrikaans developed in Africa, but over 90 percent of Afrikaans vocabulary draws from its parent language — Dutch — and it’s not spoken just in South Africa: It’s also spoken in Namibia and (to a lesser extent) in Australia, Botswana, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Zimbabwe.
