Country Info

South Africa Languages

Below you can see all the written languages used in this country. View All Countries for the list of all world countries, or All Languages for all the written languages of the world.

There are 51,002,684 people (93% of South Africa) that can read or write at least one language.

13 Writing Systems used in South Africa

English (Latin)

en-latn
language code
17,000,896
people

Zulu (Latin)

zu-latn
language code
13,161,984
people

Xhosa (Latin)

xh-latn
language code
9,871,488
people

Afrikaans (Latin)

af-latn
language code
7,129,408
people

Northern Sotho (Latin)

nso-latn
language code
5,155,110
people

Tswana (Latin)

tn-latn
language code
4,497,011
people

Southern Sotho (Latin)

st-latn
language code
4,332,486
people

Tsonga (Latin)

ts-latn
language code
2,413,030
people

Swati (Latin)

ss-latn
language code
1,480,723
people

Venda (Latin)

ve-latn
language code
1,261,356
people

Hindi (Devanagari)

hi-deva
language code
1,096,832
people

South Ndebele (Latin)

nr-latn
language code
877,465
people

Swahili (Latin)

sw-latn
language code
987
people

References

Our data is sourced from a number of places. We use ISO639 codes for the country codes. The language code we are showing is non-standard and combines the language short name with the script shortname. The population numbers, country names and script names come from the Unicode CLDR dataset.

  1. Unicode CLDR