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Map showing principal South African languages by municipality. Lighter shades indicate a non-majority plurality.

Afrikaans      Northern Sotho      Southern Sotho      Swati      Tsonga

Tswana      Venda      Xhosa      Zulu

Geographical distribution of South African languages.

Geographical distribution of the Sotho-Tswana languages languages in South Africa's provinces.

Geographical distribution of the Sesotho language in South Africa's provinces.

Geographical distribution of the Nguni languages in South Africa's provinces.

Geographical distribution of the isiZulu language in South Africa's provinces.

South Africa has 11 official languages. South Africa also recognises eight non-official languages as "national languages". Of the official languages, two are Indo-European languages — English and Afrikaans — while the other nine are languages of the Bantu family (within Africa's largest phylum, Niger-Congo).

The eleven official languages of South Africa are as follows (with the name used for each language, by speakers of that language, in brackets):

Afrikaans (Afrikaans), English, Ndebele (isiNdebele), Northern Sotho (Sesotho sa Leboa), Sotho (Sesotho), Swati (siSwati), Tsonga (Xitsonga), Tswana (Setswana), Venda (Tshivenda), Xhosa (isiXhosa), Zulu (isiZulu).

The most common language spoken at home by South Africans is Zulu (24 percent speak Zulu at home), followed by Xhosa (18 percent), and Afrikaans (13 percent). English is only the sixth-most common home language in the country, but is understood in most urban areas and is the dominant language in government and the media.

The majority of South Africans speak a language from one of the two principal branches of the Bantu languages represented in South Africa: the Sotho-Tswana branch (Sotho, Northern Sotho, Tswana), or the Nguni branch (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Ndebele). For each of the two groups, the languages within that group are for the most part intelligible to a native speaker of any other language within that group.

As can be seen from the accompanying maps, the nine indigenous African languages of South Africa can be divided into two geographical zones, with Nguni languages being predominant in the south-eastern third of the country (Indian Ocean coast) and Sotho languages being predominant in the northern third of the country located further inland, as also in Botswana and Lesotho. Gauteng is the most linguistically heterogeneous province, with roughly equal numbers of Nguni, Sotho and Indo-European language speakers. This has resulted in the spread of an urban argot, Tsotsitaal, in large urban townships in the province.

Venda and Tsonga are neither Nguni nor Sotho-Tswana languages.

Afrikaans, a language derived from Dutch, is the most widely spoken language in the western third of the country (Western and Northern Cape). It is spoken not only by a majority of whites but also by about 90 percent of Coloured (multiracial) people in the country. Afrikaans is also spoken widely across the centre and north of the country, as a second (or third or even fourth) language by Black South Africans living in farming areas.

The Constitution also recognises a further nine non-official "national languages":

Fanagalo, Khoe, Lobedu (Khilobedu), Nama, Northern Ndebele (Sindebele), Phuthi (Siphuthi), San (Khoisan/Khoesan) languages, South African Sign Language and Tamil[Tamil Nadu Language,a little rarely spoken].

In reality, the membership of this additional list above is very varied. SA Sign Language is an utterly distinct though incompletely emerged national standard language (SA Sign Language), but which also subsumes a cluster of semi-standardised dialects. The status of SA Sign Language makes South Africa one of the few countries to have legal recognition of sign language. Another four can properly be termed languages (Northern Ndebele, Phuthi, Khoe, and Nama). San (Khoesan) is an imprecisely named cluster of languages. Lobedu has been claimed to be a dialect of Northern Sotho, but is perhaps more accurately classed as an autonomous language. Fanagalo is a semi-stable pidgin of uncertain contemporary status.

Significant numbers of immigrants from Europe, elsewhere in Africa, and the Indian subcontinent means that a wide variety of other languages can also be found in parts of South Africa. In the older immigrant communities there are: Greek (ελληνικά), Gujarati, Hindi, Polish (polski), Portuguese (português), Tamil, Urdu (اُردو), Yiddish (ייִדיש), and smaller numbers of French (français) and German (Deutsch) speakers.

These non-official languages may be used in limited semi-official use where it has been determined that these languages are prevalent. More importantly, these languages have significant local functions in specific communities whose identity is tightly bound around the linguistic and cultural identity that these non-official SA languages signal.

Of the listed non-official languages, the fastest growing are perhaps Portuguese - first spoken by white settlers and black and mestiço settlers and refugees from Angola and Mozambique after they won independence from Portugal and now by more recent immigrants from those countries again - and increasingly French, spoken by immigrants and refugees from Francophone Central Africa. Finally, more recently, many thousands of speakers of North, Central and West African languages have arrived in South Africa, mostly in the major cities, especially in Johannesburg and Pretoria, but also Cape Town and Durban.

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• Seroa

Chapter 1 (Founding Provisions), Section 6 (Languages) of the Constitution of South Africa is the basis for government language policy. The English text of the constitution signed by president Nelson Mandela on 16 December 1996 curiously contains the names of the languages in the language of the language itself rather than English. Controversy surrounds the use of Sepedi as opposed to Sesotho sa Leboa (which was the wording in the 1994 interim constitution) in the text:

The 2001 census recorded the following home language speakers:

• Introduction to the languages of South Africa
• Ethnologue Listing of South African Languages
• Project to translate Free and Open Source software into South African languages with live web-based translation
• PanAfriL10n page on South Africa
• The Language Museum
• Statistics SA