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South Africa has eleven official languages. After democracy came, people said, “Okay, how do we create
order without having different groups feel like they’ve been left out of power again?” English is the
international language and the language of money and of the media, so we had to keep that. Most people were
forced to learn at least some Afrikaans, so it’s useful to keep that, too. Plus we didn’t want the white minority
to feel ostracized in the new South Africa, or else they’d take all their money and leave.
Of the African languages, Zulu has the largest number of native speakers, but we couldn’t keep that
without also having Xhosa and Tswana and Ndebele. Then there’s Swazi, Tsonga, Venda, Sotho, and Pedi. We
tried to keep all the major groups happy, so the next thing we knew we’d made eleven languages official
languages. And those are just the languages big enough to demand recognition; there are dozens more.
It’s the Tower of Babel in South Africa. Every single day. Every day you see people completely lost, trying
to have conversations and having no idea what the other person is saying. Zulu and Tswana are fairly
common. Tsonga and Pedi are pretty fringe. The more common your tongue, the less likely you are to learn
others. The more fringe, the more likely you are to pick up two or three. In the cities most people speak at least
some English and usually a bit of Afrikaans, enough to get around. You’ll be at a party with a dozen people
where bits of conversation are flying by in two or three different languages. You’ll miss part of it, someone
might translate on the fly to give you the gist, you pick up the rest from the context, and you just figure it out.
The crazy thing is that, somehow, it works. Society functions. Except when it doesn’t.