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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. [4]
It became one of South Africa's 12 official languages in 1994. [6] According to Ethnologue, it is the second-most widely spoken of the Bantu languages, after Swahili. [a] Like many other Bantu languages, it is written with the Latin alphabet. In South African English, the language is often referred to in its native form, isiZulu. [10]
The Indigenous languages of the Americas had widely varying demographics, from the Quechuan languages, Aymara, Guarani, and Nahuatl, which had millions of active speakers, to many languages with only several hundred speakers. After pre-Columbian times, several Indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas, based on European, Indigenous ...
Some native speakers of Bantu languages and English also speak Afrikaans as a second language. It is widely taught in South African schools, with about 10.3 million second-language students. [1] Afrikaans is offered at many universities outside South Africa, including in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Russia and the United States. [85]
Most spoken languages, Ethnologue, 2024 [4] Language Family Branch First-language (L1) speakers Second-language (L2) speakers Total speakers (L1+L2) English (excl. creole languages) Indo-European: Germanic: 380 million 1.135 billion 1.515 billion Mandarin Chinese (incl. Standard Chinese, but excl. other varieties) Sino-Tibetan: Sinitic: 941 ...
Main languages. The most widely spoken languages throughout the continent of South America are Portuguese and Spanish. Over 50% of the population speaks Portuguese, but the number of Spanish speakers is close behind the number of Portuguese speakers. Portuguese is the official language of Brazil, while Spanish is the official language of most ...
South African English(SAfE, SAfEn, SAE, en-ZA)[a]is the set of English language dialectsnative to South Africans. History. [edit] Britishsettlers first arrived in the South African region in 1795, when they established a military holding operation at the Cape Colony.
The family's most extensive branch, the Semitic languages (including Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew among others), is the only branch of Afroasiatic that is spoken outside Africa. [9] Some of the most widely spoken Afroasiatic languages include Arabic (a Semitic language, and a recent arrival from West Asia), Somali (Cushitic), Berber (Berber ...