The Linguistic Situation of South Africa

When it comes to linguistics, South Africa is like a crucible of language. South Africa has 11 major languages ​​from Africa and Europe. The main languages ​​used are Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sesotho, Swaziland, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Kosa, Zulu. To understand how these languages ​​reach South Africa, we must first see the history of the people living in the country. The first language used in South Africa is the Khoisan language. This language is spoken by indigenous peoples Khoikhio of the Republic of South Africa, who lives mainly in the southern coastal area of ​​the country.

Aspects of the review include the following subtitles: South African language; mathematics education and learning in the multilingual classroom in South Africa; does language influence mathematics education and learning? And the role of teacher and learner in class utterances. Post apartheid system The new 1993/1996 Constitution of South Africa uses language as human resources and multilingualism as a national resource to promote African primary languages ​​together with national official positions with English and Afrikaans (Hornberger & Vaish, 2009). This created a multicultural student community in classrooms, schools and universities throughout the country. "Educational language policy" adopted in 1997 acknowledges all 11 official languages. According to this policy, learners have the right to study with their own official language (Ministry of Education, 1997).

Every educational institution in South Africa has a very multilingual diversity. South Africa is one of the few countries in the world, and its constitution has 11 official languages. Several educational institutions are privatized, and as part of that particular curriculum, only one standard language, English is preferred as the preferred language. Such institutions usually offer one or two African languages ​​as optional languages, but European languages ​​such as German, Spanish, Italian and French are also the second and third languages ​​too There are three or four. In public schools, English is primarily used as the preferred language because of the number of African-speaking students and the lack of economic or capacity competence of parents and guardians.