grammatical constraints and motivations for - University of the ...

The following graph provides and outline of the statistics for mother tongue
speakers per language in South Africa:
Graph 1: Comparative language use in South Africa (1996 and 2001)
www.cyberserv.co.za/~jako/lang/stats.htm
Census (2001) results show that 3 673 203 people in South Africa speak English
as their mother tongue, constituting only 8.2% of the country’s total population.
Afrikaans mother-tongue speakers comprise 13.3% of the country’s population,
while the majority of the population speaks Zulu and Xhosa as a first language.
The scenario may appear to be as indicated in the foregoing graph and census
statistics, however, statistics of the number of speakers do not provide a clear
enough illustration of the current linguistic situation in South Africa. Although
English only ranks in fifth place in terms of the number of mother tongue speakers
(see Graph 1), it is a widely spoken language because a large population in South
Africa speak English as a second language. Therefore, the significance of English
emerges in terms of the number of people able to communicate in the language,
rather than the number of mother- tongue speakers.
According to Gough, 33% of Africans have knowledge of English while 89%
of Whites and 51% of Coloureds have a speaking ability in English
(http://www.ru.ac.za/affiliates/dsae/GOUGH.HTML). Therefore, although
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