Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of phonetic symbols
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I The main language groupings
- 1 South Africa: a sociolinguistic overview
- 2 The Khoesan Languages
- 3 The Bantu languages: sociohistorical perspectives
- 4 Afrikaans: considering origins
- 5 South African English
- 6 South African Sign Language: one language or many?
- 7 German speakers in South Africa
- 8 Language change, survival, decline: Indian languages in South Africa
- Part II Language contact
- Part III Language planning, policy and education
- Index
- References
1 - South Africa: a sociolinguistic overview
from Part I - The main language groupings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of phonetic symbols
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I The main language groupings
- 1 South Africa: a sociolinguistic overview
- 2 The Khoesan Languages
- 3 The Bantu languages: sociohistorical perspectives
- 4 Afrikaans: considering origins
- 5 South African English
- 6 South African Sign Language: one language or many?
- 7 German speakers in South Africa
- 8 Language change, survival, decline: Indian languages in South Africa
- Part II Language contact
- Part III Language planning, policy and education
- Index
- References
Summary
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).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Language in South Africa , pp. 11 - 26Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
References
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