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Endangered Language In South Africa

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Endangered languages are when people no longer use the language frequently, or completely stop speaking it. This in turn results in the language not being passed on to the next generation, therefore dying out of society (UNESCO, 2003, p.2). South Africa’s nine indigenous languages are, “IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, Setwana, Sesotho, XiTsonga, IsiNdebele, Siswati, Tshivenda and Sepedi” (Brand South Africa, 2012, “languages”, para.2). According the Census (2011) results, the percentages of languages used in homes of South African citizens are, “IsiZulu 22.7%, IsiXhosa 16%, Afrikaans 13.5%, English 9.6%, Setwana 8% , Sesotho 7.6%, the rest of the languages are spoken as home languages by less than 5% of the population each, with IsiZulu as the most spoken …show more content…

Colonial education mainly did not develop the African student’s self-esteem and pride. Education in Africa today is still not liberated of this colonial legacy (Bunyi, 1999). A historical view suggests that the pre- colonial non-school education, which was firmly anchored in the culture and everyday experiences of African society, was African in ideology, content and methodology (Buyi, 1999). However, research suggests that the Africans themselves were opposed to the teaching of and in the indigenous languages, since English had developed into the language of political power and socio-economic status in Africa (Bunyi, …show more content…

According to Ministerial Committee appointed by the minister of education (2003), approximately six thousand languages are currently spoken and at least fifty percent of those will have died out in the next fifty years (Ministerial Committee, 2003, p.5). The top twenty languages spoken by more than fifty million people each are spoken by fifty percent of the world’s population while many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, mostly with less than ten thousand speakers (Heine & Nurse, 2000). The African continent has 2035 indigenous African languages, and this sum represents nearly one-third of the world’s languages (Heine & Nurse, 2000). The languages of Africa are classified into four major groups; Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo and KhoiSan (Ministerial Committee, 2003, p.7). The complex spectrum of the indigenous languages of South Africa is a family of languages comprising an estimated 1436 languages which fall in the Niger-Congo group, although some of the languages spoken in South Africa also comes from the KhoiSan group (Williamson & Blench, 2000). Linguist Alice Taff says, “Every nation in this planet has small language communities that are standing their ground against language loss. And it’s a relatively new phenomenon that there is a pushing back from within the communities saying, ‘This is us and we are going to

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