It’s estimated that half of South Africa’s people have a speaking knowledge of the language. Later immigrants – Greeks, Lebanese, Eastern European Jews and others – added new words to local English.Īccording to the 2011 census, English is the home language of 9.6% of South Africans – a third of them not white.Įnglish is the language of public life: government, business and the media. Here and there are words imported from British, Portuguese and Dutch colonies, such as India, Mozambique, Malaysia and Indonesia.

South African English also borrows from African languages such as isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho and Setswana, and the indigenous languages of the Khoesan and Nama people. These influences include Afrikaans, a South African language that grew out of a variety of Dutch spoken in the 1500s. Since then South Africa’s everyday English has gradually absorbed many words from African languages.

By Mary Alexander on 2 September 2021 Mixed with over a dozen African languages for over two centuries, spiced by imports from British, Dutch and Portuguese colonies, South African English has its own rich, varied and sometimes weird flavour.Įnglish has been spoken in South Africa for over 200 years, at least since the British military seized the Cape of Good Hope settlement from the Dutch in 1795 to keep the Cape out of the hands of revolutionary France, then a Dutch ally.

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