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More people choose English as the first spoken language in South Africa. IsiXhosa and Zulu might be the most spoken languages among South African but English comes first.
English is fast becoming the language of choice. It has been reported that the 2011 census results showed that black households accounted for about 1.2 million of the 4.9 million people who speak English as their first language, some of them says Isixhos and Isizulu are the boring and hard used to infuriate and embarrass them.
English has become the preferred language of teaching and learning at schools as well as for business and it influence the whole society. It should be expected that there would be great shift towards it. It is preferred as the number one language when it comes to teaching and learning.
In this country of South Africa we cannot run-away from this, English dominates the whole world as the most spoken language because it is so easily understandable. There are people who would usually say if you want to succeed in the future you have to be able to speak English fluently and you need to start using it as your first language. The most important thing is not to forget our mother tongues, we must not forget where we come from and most importantly we must be proud of ourselves and our heritage. The thing that can help us to keep our heritage on high standard is to educate our kids to understand, speak and be able to write their mother tongues language fluently first.
Black people judge each other if someone does not speak English fluently and there are those people who undermine their first language. If you compare English and IsiXhosa languages there is huge different between them because English is easier than IsiXhosa and if you can prove my point by teaching you’re kids these two languages you will find that English is most understandable and it`s easy to pronounce words of the English language than words of Xhosa.
Your kids would understand English first, they would able to speak, write and understand fluently. They would take time to understand IsiXhosa while it is their mother tongues. The child could understand English as early as the age of 3 years old while with IsiXhosa the child might understand it at early age of 10 years old. So there is a large difference between the two.
I have asked one of the student who study at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) why he choose or rather preferred English as first spoken language and he said to me English comes first from all eleven official languages of South Africa. The English language is number one language and the most spoken language. He also said it is more important than others because sometimes you cannot find job if you do not understand English even computer programmes are written in and designed in English that is why English is the more important language than the rest. He added that it is also the easiest way of communicating between people of different races.
He said: “I preferred to choose English because it is easy and straight forward it does not have hard words to pronounce than IsiXhosa words such as (Qaqa, nkra) and if you know it you can be able to have conversation with different race of people at NMMU and nothing you can do or achieve without speaking even if you go to overseas you have to understand it and able to speak and write it”
Here comes the question why people undermine their mother tongue prefer to speak others fluently? It’s understandable that English is prominent we cannot change that but why these eleven official languages in South Africa must not be equally in order to balance them. We criticize each other concerning the poor English and blame each other by not being good on pronunciation. English is important but it does not mean we must forget about our culture, identity and in order to do this we must stop speaking English to our parents, in rural areas and among people we know will be able to understand and embrace our culture.
