The aim of this article is to examine literacy and numeracy scores of learners who participated in the South African Kha Ri Gude Literacy Campaign. Analysing the learning outcomes of the 2011 cohort of a total of 485,941 participants, the authors seek to identify variations between the learners’ achievements across the eleven official South African languages. Besides exploring the relationship between the literacy and numeracy assessment scores by language, the authors also analyse these scores against various relevant features of the learners’ profiles such as their residential type (rural village, urban township etc.), regularity of class attendance and previous school attendance, if any. They asked ten language experts who had been involved in the development of the campaign’s learner materials to rank the various languages according to their level of difficulty with regard to literacy learning and to interpret the variation in learner achievement scores across the South African languages. This interpretation demonstrates that the challenges of teaching and learning literacy and numeracy in South African languages go beyond the difficulty levels established on the basis of linguistic criteria. The authors contend that future literacy programmes will have to take existing hierarchies and inequalities among language groups into account and devise differentiated strategies to achieve parity of learning.