Before coming to South Africa, I knew that South Africa had eleven official languages and could name three of them: English, Afrikaans, and Zulu (which I now know should actually be written isiZulu). A few months before my departure I tried to learn some Afrikaans but did not make it very far as I knew it would not be necessary for my studies or communicating.
After being in South Africa for three months, I have realized how distorted this view of the languages spoken in South Africa is. To begin with, I did not realize how few native English speakers there are, rather it has just been accepted as the best mode of universal communication especially for economic purposes. Additionally, I am disappointed that Afrikaans is the only language that I was compelled to try and learn before coming. From my observations, nearly everyone whose home language is Afrikaans has access to quality education which would enable them to learn English at a young age. In contrast, children with other home languages tend to live in poorer or rural communities where their early childhood education may not teach them how to speak English well until after age eight. I have learned this through my time at SAVF aftercare in Soshanguve where I am unable to converse with many of the younger students except with the limited phrases I know of Tswana (taught to us by our mentors after we arrived in South Africa) or their basic understanding of English. It would be hard to remedy this as I didn’t even know Setswana was a language until arriving in South Africa. This skewed perception of the diversity of languages in South Africa is also shown through literature. While there are many books available at all levels in English as well as many options in Afrikaans both as formal literary movements and as children's books, there are considerably fewer books published in the other official South African languages. This access to reading materials can result in more economic and educational inequality between groups in South Africa than there already exists. Once again this would be difficult to remedy as this lack of books in certain languages means that there is no constant demand ready for new books to be published, therefore discouraging publishers. The diversity of language in South Africa leads to many impossible questions. For example, how should the constitutional right to education in one's home language be enforced when schools and universities in eleven languages would be hard to implement. Overall, language can be seen as an important factor in the inequality in South African society. For reference this is the break down of South Africa's official languages by percent of population's home language : 1. isiZulu (23%) 2. isiXhosa (16%) 3. Afrikaans (13%) 4. English (10%) 5. Northern Sotho (9%) 6. Setswana (8%) 7. Sesotho (7%) 8. Tsonga (4%) 9. Swati (2%) 10. Venda (2%) 11. Ndebele (2%) **South African Sign Language is also treated like an official language with all official media including an interpreter
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