Europeans
Although most of the English spoken in South Africa is spoken by nonwhites, the term "English speakers" is often used to identify non-Afrikaner whites in particular, largely because this group shares no other common cultural feature. Some of South Africa's roughly 2 million English-speaking whites trace their forebears to the large influx of British immigrants of the 1820s and the 1830s. Many more Europeans arrived in the late nineteenth century, after the discovery of gold and diamonds.
Almost two-thirds of English speakers trace their ancestry to England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland, but a few arrived from the Netherlands, Germany, or France and joined the English-speaking community in South Africa for a variety of social and political reasons. During the late 1930s and the 1940s, East Europeans arrived in substantial numbers. Unlike the Afrikaners, the English-speaking community has not worked to forge a common identity. During the apartheid era, non-Afrikaner whites held relatively little political power, but they maintained their superior wealth, in many cases, through their activities in commerce and business.
Also among South African whites are about 49,000 Portuguese immigrants, and 13,000 Greeks. South Africa's Jewish population of about 100,000 has been a relatively cohesive community, in comparison with other non-Afrikaner whites. Many South African Jews trace their ancestry to Eastern Europe or to the United Kingdom, and many others fled from Nazi Germany during the 1930s and the 1940s. In general, Jewish South Africans opposed apartheid, in part because of its emphasis on racial purity derived from National Socialist (Nazi) thought. Many Jews have also experienced religious discrimination in South Africa.
English has been both a highly influential language in South Africa, and a language influenced, in turn, by adaptation in the country's different communities. Estimates suggest that some 45% of the population have a speaking knowledge of English.
English was declared the official language of the Cape Colony in 1822 (replacing Dutch), and the stated language policy of the government of the time was one of Anglicisation. On the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, which united the former Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State with the Cape and Natal colonies, English was made the official language together with Dutch, which was replaced by Afrikaans in 1925.
Today, English is South Africa's lingua franca, and the primary language of government, business, and commerce. The new education curriculum makes two languages compulsory at school, with English the language of learning and teaching at most schools and tertiary educations.
According to the 2001 census, English is spoken as a home language by 8.2% of the population (3 673 206 people) – one in three of whom are not white. South Africa's Asian people, most of whom are Indian in origin, are largely English-speaking, although many also retain their languages of origin. There is also a significant group of Chinese South Africans, also largely English-speaking but who also retain their languages of origin as well.
South African English is an established and unique dialect, with strong influences from Afrikaans and the country's many African languages. For example: "The old lady has been tuning me grief all avie, after she bust me and the okes gooi-ing yooees in her tjor", would translate as: "My mother has been shouting at me all afternoon after she caught my friends and I doing U-turns in her car."
As a home language, English is most common in KwaZulu-Natal, where more than a third (34.9%) of all English-speaking South Africans are found, making up 13.6% of the provincial population. Another third (30%) of English speakers live in Gauteng, where it is the language of 12.5% of the population, and 23.8% in the Western Cape, where it is spoken by 19.3% of the population.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
