South Africa is a multilingual country on a multilingual continent. Understanding this requires all of us to acknowledge first that there are 12 official named tongues (including South African Sign Language). It also requires us to understand and develop an awareness that there are many languages that have not been declared as official tongues, including Khoi and San.
Within each of the named languages – for example, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho, Sepedi, Tshivenda, XiTsonga, Afrikaans or English – there are different dialects and varieties. Examples of these varieties include isiMpondo (or isiHlubi), Afrikaaps as well as sePitoli, seSoweto,
