The languages of South Africa

!ke e: ǀxarra ǁke, meaning Unity in Diversity,- the motto of the Republic of South Africa, a country I have always thought to be very interesting. South Africa is an multi-ethnic country that encompasses a big variety of languages and cultures. First time I got in touch with one of the languages spoken there, called Afrikaans was when I heard a song of the South African band Die Antwoord. My fellow German speakers will already notice this band's name looks very German. German in South Africa? How so? Well Die Antwoord is not a misspelled version of the German word die Antwort, but its actually really means the same, die Antwort- the answer. The reason is the following; Afrikaans which is also refereed to as “Cape-Dutch” is one of the official languages of South Africa. It is indeed a variety of Dutch brought to the country by the former colonial rulers from the Netherlands. The African country's language's resemblance to my own mother tongue got me curious, so I started to do a little research about it. Although we might not be able to speak Afrikaans or understand it when it's spoken really quickly to us, we are actually able to understand it if we read it and know the context. I read some Wikipedia articles in Afrikaans and could understand a lot of the words since they were similar to German, just that we would maybe consider some of them to be archaic.

But Afrikaans is not the only language spoken in South Africa. The country actually has 11 official languages(Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu.), the most common of them being English, Afrikaans, Isizulu and Xhosa. So how does this work? Is every South African a polyglot that speaks 11 languages? Or do different people know different languages and can't communicate at all? No. In fact English is wide spread over the country and known by almost everyone. Most schools there are English and teach Afrikaans, Isizulu or Xhosa as second languages. There are some schools which are an Afrikaans or Isuzula medium and teach English as a second language. Generally home languages are Afrikaans for the white and Isizulu or Xhosa for the black population. To sum it up, almost everyone in South Africa is fluent in English so there are no language barriers in between the different natives.

                               Don't some of these words sound familiar to German natives?