I knew going into my trip that South Africa had eleven official languages, but I figured that since my school was an English school everyone around me would be speaking English. In America, it seems like so many of us are monolingual. We get some schooling in a foreign language, but then we only use it in those few years in junior high and high school and are no where near fluent. Here, it’s completely different. While a good number of South Africans do speak English, for the majority of people it is not their first language. Zulu is the mother tongue of 22% of the population, followed by Xhosa at about 18% , Afrikaans at 16%, and Sepedi at 9%. English comes in fifth, with only 8% of the population speaking it as their first
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