Languages of South Africa

Methodology

This map shows data that was compiled and published by Statistics South Africa titled South African Census Community Profiles 2011. The 2011 census surveyed more than 51 million people, asking them to identify which language was used most often by each person in their household, "whether or not they consider it their mother tongue."

People were also asked to identify a second language. However, those data aren't contained in full-census community profiles. Instead, they're published in the 10% sample dataset, but that data can only be mapped down to the level of municipality.

Some notes:

Language names used here are as reported in the 2011 census results, which may not always be precise (e.g., Sepedi v. Sesotho sa Leboa).
The "Second Most Common" map represents the second most common language spoken in an area — not the "second language" distribution.
The dataset includes direct compilations of data at various administration levels including provinces, municipalities, main places, sub places, and small areas.
The community profile dataset contains spatial data for electoral wards; however, the language results are not directly mapped to those areas and wards are not a simple aggregation of smaller areas. Still, we calculated statistics for wards by doing a spatial merge of statistics for small areas whose centroids were contained within the ward.
Density maps were also not provided directly but were instead calculated by this work.
This web map is made performant by using MapLibre GL JS with vectorized tiles created by Tippecanoe. Tiles are created at multiple zoom levels, and small areas with many complex nodes can display as overly simplified shapes when zooming out far past their normal display level — zoom in when looking at small areas to see their true spatial representation.