Answer to Map #84

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Answer: This week’s map was a choropleth depicting the percentage of residents of each South African district whose first language is Afrikaans.

The data used to make this map came from the 2011 South African census. The darkest shade of red indicates districts where more than 80% of residents speak Afrikaans as a first language. Namakwa in Northern Cape Province tops the list; in that district, 93.9% of the people speak Afrikaans as their first language. The second darkest shade of red is for districts with more than 70%, the third darkest shade for districts with more than 60%, and so on.

The Afrikaans language is derived from Dutch, which was brought to southern Africa by Dutch settlers beginning in the 1650s. The name “Afrikaans” was derived from “Afrikaans-Hollands,” which meant “African Dutch” and referred to the vernacular language spoken by Dutch settlers in South Africa. The Dutch East India Company founded a colony at the Cape of Good Hope, which became the modern-day city of Cape Town. Because of these historical reasons, the Afrikaans language is used predominantly in the wester part of South Africa, which was the region where the Dutch colonists were based.

From 1948 through 1994, South Africa was governed by a discriminatory policy known as apartheid, which is the Afrikaans word for “separateness.” Under that policy, South Africans were divided into one of four racial groups: “white,” “black,” “coloured,” and “Indian.” The white group included many speakers of both English and Afrikaans. The country’s official policy gave equal status to those two languages in government and education. South Africa’s various indigenous languages did not have any official status prior to 1994. Today, however, South Africa has eleven official languages. According to the 2011 census, the languages most widely spoken as a first language are Zulu (22.7%), Xhosa (16.0%), Afrikaans (13.5%), and English (9.6%). Understandably, most people in the country learn to speak more than one language.

According to the racial policies of apartheid, the “coloured” category was for the descendants of mixed unions of white settlers and indigenous Africans. This category was considered formally separate from both white and black. Coloureds were far more integrated into South African white society than were blacks. Although apartheid has been abolished, this categorization is still used today in South Africa’s census. Most coloureds live in the western part of South Africa—the first part to experience European colonization—and most speak Afrikaans. Afrikaans is the first language of 75.8% of coloureds and 60.8% of whites. The reason the percentage of Afrikaans speakers is higher among coloureds than whites is because many whites are descended from subsequent English settlers, but most coloureds descend from those first Dutch communities.

A very few students who submitted solutions this week guessed that the map had to do with race rather than language and proposed that it was a choropleth of the distribution of South Africa’s coloured population. The pattern of such a map would indeed be quite similar, and since our map doesn’t tell you what the scale is, it seems fair enough to accept the answers of those people who said it was a map of the coloured population.

One common answer we did not accept was that the map depicted the distribution of speakers of Dutch. Dutch and Afrikaans are closely related, of course, but Dutch ceased to have any official status in South Africa in the 1980s (and it hadn’t been widely spoken in the country since a very long time before that). We clearly indicated from the outset that this map was based on the 2011 census and depicted current patterns.

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