South Africa: a sociolinguistic overview

Abstract

LANGUAGE PROFILE South Africa has been the meeting ground of speakers of languages belonging to several major families, the chief ones being Khoesan, Niger–Congo, Indo-European and Sign Language. (It is surely time to include Sign languages in our genealogies of language, and to devote as much space to them as to any other language family in our sociolinguistic surveys.) The Khoe (formerly called ‘Hottentot’) and San (a.k.a. ‘Bushman’) languages, thought to be historically unrelated (and in fact divisible into three families) are now, with very few exceptions, close to extinction. The Bantu languages (belonging to the wider Niger–Congo family) are the numerically predominant languages of the country, comprising essentially the following: the Nguni cluster (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Ndebele); the Sotho cluster (North Sotho, South Sotho, Tswana); Tsonga; Venda. (See map 15.1 for the main distribution patterns of these languages.) The term ‘cluster’ denotes a set of varieties that are closely related along linguistic lines (though in terms of socio-political status the varieties may be quite independent). In addition to these official languages a number of Bantu languages are spoken in smaller numbers by migrant mineworkers from neighbouring countries, and by more recent immigrants. Such languages include Chopi, Kalanga, Shona, Chewa, etc. Still other special cases exist: Phuthi, for example, is a minority language of the eastern Cape, more widely represented in the neighbouring country, Lesotho (Donnelly 1999); Makhuwa and Yao are languages spoken in Durban by the descendants of ex-slaves from Mozambique dating back to the 1870s (Mesthrie 1996).