Many languages, one bedtime

The best South African evidence suggests that being taught in the home language in the first years of school helps a child’s English rather than holding it back. Two languages won’t confuse your child, and how much of each they hear predicts how well they learn it, so read, talk and tell stories in the language of home, not only in English.

South Africa gained its twelfth official language on 26 June 2026, almost three years after most reports said it had. In a country with twelve, many homes speak more than one, and raising a bilingual reader in South Africa is often simply part of bedtime.

How many official languages does South Africa have?

Twelve. The Constitution Eighteenth Amendment Act adds South African Sign Language to the list in section 6, and the President signed it on 19 July 2023. But the Act itself says it comes into operation “on a date fixed by the President by proclamation in the Gazette”, and that proclamation was published on 26 June 2026, with immediate effect.¹ The twelfth official language is one you see rather than hear.

In Census 2022, the language spoken most often at home was isiZulu, for 24.4% of South Africans, then isiXhosa (16.3%), Afrikaans (10.6%) and Sepedi (10.0%). English came fifth, at 8.7%: fewer than one South African in eleven, almost exactly its share in 1996. In KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, four in five people speak isiZulu and isiXhosa respectively; in Gauteng no language has a majority, and the largest, isiZulu, is 23.1%.²

These are only the languages spoken most often. Many South Africans speak several, and in a 2023 national survey, 68% of adults could read in more than one.³

Is it easier to learn to read in some languages?

South Africa’s languages are written very differently, and that changes how reading is measured. The Nguni languages (isiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele and siSwati) join prefixes and suffixes into long words; the Sotho-Tswana languages (Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana) write them as short, separate words. So the Department of Basic Education’s Grade 3 benchmark for fluent reading is 35 correct words a minute in the Nguni languages, 60 in the Sotho-Tswana languages and Afrikaans, and 70 in English.⁴

One benchmark is the same everywhere. In Grade 1, children in every language are expected to manage 40 letter sounds a minute, “since all our languages share the same alphabetic system”.⁴ And a second difference favours most South African children. Ten of the eleven spoken official languages have what linguists call transparent spelling, where letters map regularly onto sounds; English does not.⁵

In a classic comparison of English and 12 other European spelling systems, children learning English developed basic reading more than twice as slowly as children learning languages with regular spelling.⁶ That study was not about South African languages, so take it as background.

Transparent is not the same as easy. In the department’s 2025 national survey, just over 30% of children in Grades 2 and 3 reached their home-language fluency benchmarks.⁴ Spelling that makes sense helps a child crack the code; understanding still takes fluency, vocabulary and a great deal of practice.

Which language will my child learn to read in?

For most South African children, an African language first and English later. In PIRLS 2021, 69% of the Grade 4s tested wrote in an African language.⁷ Most schools that teach in an African language in Grades R to 3 switch to English in Grade 4; a few switch to Afrikaans, and some teach in English from Grade 1.⁸ (What those PIRLS results mean, and what is helping, is in our piece on reading in South Africa.)

The policy meant to guide all this dates from 14 July 1997, and its intention is generous. The Language in Education Policy sets out “to establish additive multilingualism as an approach to language in education”, and its principle is “to maintain home language(s) while providing access to and the effective acquisition of additional language(s)”.⁹ A child, in other words, should gain languages rather than swap one for another. The policy also gives the right to choose the language of learning to the individual.

Practice is harder: the 2025 survey found that by Grade 4, when most children move to learning through English, “the majority have not yet developed sufficient reading skills in either language”, and only 35% of Grade 3s met the benchmark for reading in English as an additional language.⁴ So the department is stretching the home language further up the school. In 2025, Grade 4 Mathematics and Natural Sciences and Technology began to be taught and assessed bilingually, in the home language alongside English, in 11,948 schools across all nine provinces. The first of those papers were written on 24 and 25 November 2025.¹⁰

The independent 2030 Reading Panel welcomes the change, with a warning. Many children, it says, don’t build strong reading foundations in their home language in Grades R to 3, “despite being taught in that language”. That doesn’t make the new bilingual lessons wrong, in the panel’s view, but it does make them “insufficient on their own”.¹¹ For the years before the switch, see our guide to Grade 2.

Does learning in the home language hold back English?

It is the question behind many a school choice, and in South Africa it has never been only a question about teaching: in 1955, under the Bantu Education Act, mother-tongue instruction for black children was extended in place of English or Afrikaans, as part of a system whose purpose was oppressive.¹²

The best modern evidence turns the worry about English on its head. In 2016 the economists Stephen Taylor and Marisa von Fintel used data on every South African primary school to compare children in the same schools before and after the school changed its language policy.¹³ A simple comparison made English-from-Grade-1 schools look better. Once the differences between schools were taken out, the result reversed: “mother tongue instruction in the early grades significantly improves English acquisition, as measured in grades 4, 5 and 6.”

The working paper behind the study puts the cost of three years of English, instead of home-language teaching, at about 0.13 to 0.17 of a standard deviation in later English scores: roughly a third of a year of learning.¹⁴ It is not a randomised trial, the effect varied a great deal from school to school, and the test data are from 2012. But it fits what the authors call “pedagogical theory which promotes the acquisition of a first language before moving on to a second language.”

The opposite belief persists partly because the raw numbers seem to support it. In PIRLS 2021, among children tested in English, those who speak English at home averaged 433, and those who mostly speak another language at home averaged 356; two-thirds of the English-tested children were in the second group.⁷ Children tested in Afrikaans (387) and English (382) scored highest overall, and those tested in Setswana (211) lowest.

But language here stands in for wealth and history. The department’s 2025 survey, in which English-tested children also came out ahead, calls such advantages “largely attributable to the higher average socio-economic status” of the groups concerned.⁴ The gap tells you mostly about money, and about which families choose English, not about what English teaching does for a child who speaks isiXhosa.

The same survey found a quieter strength: children tested in African languages did comparatively well on vocabulary and word-building, which the department says “confirms why it is important to learn to read in the language one understands best”. What held many back was decoding, turning print into words: on the survey’s model, even a child with perfect word knowledge would score only about 20% on comprehension without fluent reading.⁴ A child’s home language, in the department’s words, “is an important resource”. For the letters-and-sounds side of reading, see our guide to first sounds and phonics.

The gap tells you mostly about money, and about which families choose English, not about what English teaching does for a child who speaks isiXhosa.

Are bilingual children smarter?

Probably not in the way the headlines promised, and it doesn’t matter. For years, bilingual children were said to have sharper “executive function”: attention, self-control, switching between tasks. Three large meta-analyses, two of children and one of adults, have since found the effect tiny, or nothing once publication bias is allowed for.¹⁵ One pooled studies of 10,937 bilingual and 12,477 monolingual children and teenagers, aged 3 to 17, and found an effect size of 0.08, which fell to −0.04, indistinguishable from zero, after correction.

Something else may be real, and it is gentler. In a Chicago study of 72 children aged four to six, monolingual children misread what a speaker meant far more often than bilingual children did, and far more often than children who had been exposed to another language without speaking it themselves. The children who were “merely exposed to a second language” did as well as the bilinguals, despite lower scores on executive-function tests.¹⁶ It is one small study from one city. Its authors make a point any South African will recognise: “For millennia, multilingual exposure has been the norm.”

The honest case for raising a child in two languages is the languages themselves: Gogo’s stories, a cousin’s jokes, a second shelf of books. No one can promise a cleverer child, and no one should.

Will two languages confuse a baby?

No, and even newborns can tell two languages apart. In a 2010 study, babies whose mothers had spoken both English and Tagalog during pregnancy showed equal interest in both, yet could still tell English from Tagalog.¹⁷

Toddlers learning two languages may know fewer words in each than a child learning one, but about as many in total, and how much a child hears of each language predicts how well they learn it.¹⁸ That study was of Spanish-English toddlers, aged about two, from well-off families in Florida, and the gap in each single language is real. If you are worried about your child’s speech, a clinic sister or doctor can check.

The practical lesson is about amount. In a survey of 1,899 families in Flanders, Belgium, with children aged 6 to 10, the popular rule of “one parent, one language” turned out to be neither necessary nor sufficient for a child to speak the family’s minority language; the best chance came when both parents used that language at home.¹⁹ None of these studies is South African. Applied here, the lesson is simple: if you want your child to keep isiXhosa, Sesotho or Afrikaans, they need to hear plenty of it, and stories are one of the richest sources there are.

Why are there so few books in African languages?

Not for lack of readers. In the 2023 National Reading Survey, 63% of South African adults could read in at least one African language, and 76% of African-language speakers who read for enjoyment wanted to read in African languages.³ The books haven’t kept up. Among people with any books at home, 97% of English speakers had at least one book in English, and 78% of Afrikaans speakers one in Afrikaans; for isiXhosa and isiZulu speakers the figure was 68%, for Sepedi 64% and for Sesotho 52%. The survey found “similar percentages” for children’s books.

The publishers’ own figures are starker. In 2024/25, books in all nine official African languages together earned 2% of revenue in South Africa’s trade sector (general books for adults and children, as opposed to school books), against 62% for English and 36% for Afrikaans.²⁰ Across the whole industry, school books included, African languages reached 12% of local sales, and the share is growing. Revenue doesn’t count titles, and only some publishers replied. But beside a census in which fewer than one South African in eleven speaks English at home, the gap is plain.

How do you read with a child in two languages?

The most studied way of reading with young children is built on talk, and talk can happen in any language. In Khayelitsha, Cape Town, a book-sharing programme tested in a randomised trial was taught to carers in isiXhosa, and what it taught was conversation: following the baby’s lead, pointing and naming, and linking the pictures to the baby’s own world.²¹ (How to read this way, by age, is in our guide to reading aloud.)

The American Academy of Pediatrics, in its 2024 policy statement, backs funding for children’s books “in the languages preferred by the family”, and adds: “Bilingual books may be particularly welcome when older siblings or adults in the home are learning English.”²² Our own books come in five languages: English, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans and Sesotho, and if you’d like another, you can tell us when you order.

Stories told without a book may count too. In a 2015 comparison of English picture books with everyday speech, the researcher D. W. Massaro proposed that the differences are more about formal against informal language than about print against speech.²³ We read that as a licence: a grandmother telling an old story in rich, careful isiZulu may give a child some of what a book does. The leap is ours, and Massaro didn’t test it, but it is a good reason to ask Gogo or Oupa for a story.

Twelve official languages, and one bedtime a night. If the language of home is one you want your child to keep, give it plenty of those bedtimes: in the studies above, the more of a language a child heard, the better they learned it.

Sources

1. Constitution Eighteenth Amendment Act 3 of 2023, Government Gazette No. 49041, 27 July 2023 (sections 1 and 2; assented to 19 July 2023). juta.co.za (PDF); Proclamation R.321 of 2026, Government Gazette No. 54901, 26 June 2026, which brought the Act into force, text as summarised by Acts Online. acts.co.za; and Proclamation Notice 324 of 2026, Government Gazette No. 54933, 2 July 2026, correcting Proclamation R.321. justice.gov.za (PDF)
2. Statistics South Africa (2023). Census 2022 Statistical Release P0301.4. Pretoria: Stats SA. Tables 2.8 and 2.9. census.statssa.gov.za (PDF)
3. Polzer-Ngwato, T., Shilakoe, L., Morse, K., & Huston, K. (2023). National Reading Survey 2023 Findings Report. Nal’ibali Trust (National Reading Barometer). Executive summary, p. 9. lhg.cput.ac.za
4. Department of Basic Education (2025). Funda Uphumelele National Survey: Summary Report, and Policy Summary. Pretoria: DBE. Summary Report (PDF); Policy Summary (PDF)
5. South African Human Rights Commission (2021). The Right to Read and Write (Section 11 Committee). ru.ac.za (PDF)
6. Seymour, P. H. K., Aro, M., & Erskine, J. M. (2003). Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies. British Journal of Psychology, 94(2), 143–174. doi.org/10.1348/000712603321661859
7. Department of Basic Education (2023). PIRLS 2021: South African Main Report (K. Roux, S. van Staden & M. Tshele, Centre for Evaluation and Assessment, University of Pretoria). Pretoria: DBE. Tables 2.2 and 2.3. hdl.handle.net/2263/93145
8. Spaull, N. (2022). 2022 Background Report for the 2030 Reading Panel. Cape Town: 2030 Reading Panel, p. 5. readingpanel.co.za (PDF)
9. Department of Education (1997). Language in Education Policy, 14 July 1997. Text as reproduced by Université Laval (CEFAN). axl.cefan.ulaval.ca
10. Department of Basic Education (2025). Grade 4s write MTbBE assessments (news item, November 2025). education.gov.za
11. Lucwaba, S. (2026). 2026 Background Report for the 2030 Reading Panel. Johannesburg: 2030 Reading Panel, p. 29. readingpanel.co.za (PDF)
12. Eriksson, K. (2014). Does the language of instruction in primary school affect later labour market outcomes? Evidence from South Africa. Economic History of Developing Regions, 29(2), 311–335. doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2014.955272
13. Taylor, S., & von Fintel, M. (2016). Estimating the impact of language of instruction in South African primary schools: A fixed effects approach. Economics of Education Review, 50, 75–89. doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2016.01.003
14. Taylor, S., & Coetzee, M. (2013). Stellenbosch Economic Working Paper 21/13, the working-paper version of the study above (Marisa Coetzee is Marisa von Fintel’s earlier surname). ekon.sun.ac.za
15. Gunnerud, H. L., ten Braak, D., Reikerås, E. K. L., Donolato, E., & Melby-Lervåg, M. (2020). Is bilingualism related to a cognitive advantage in children? Psychological Bulletin, 146(12), 1059–1083. doi.org/10.1037/bul0000301; Lowe, C. J., Cho, I., Goldsmith, S. F., & Morton, J. B. (2021). The bilingual advantage in children’s executive functioning is not related to language status. Psychological Science, 32(7), 1115–1146. doi.org/10.1177/0956797621993108; Lehtonen, M., et al. (2018). Is bilingualism associated with enhanced executive functioning in adults? Psychological Bulletin, 144(4), 394–425. doi.org/10.1037/bul0000142
16. Fan, S. P., Liberman, Z., Keysar, B., & Kinzler, K. D. (2015). The exposure advantage: Early exposure to a multilingual environment promotes effective communication. Psychological Science, 26(7), 1090–1097. doi.org/10.1177/0956797615574699
17. Byers-Heinlein, K., Burns, T. C., & Werker, J. F. (2010). The roots of bilingualism in newborns. Psychological Science, 21(3), 343–348. doi.org/10.1177/0956797609360758
18. Hoff, E., Core, C., Place, S., Rumiche, R., Señor, M., & Parra, M. (2012). Dual language exposure and early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language, 39(1), 1–27. doi.org/10.1017/S0305000910000759
19. De Houwer, A. (2007). Parental language input patterns and children’s bilingual use. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28(3), 411–424. doi.org/10.1017/S0142716407070221
20. Le Roux, E., & Harvett, S. (2026). South African Book Publishing Industry Survey, 2024–25 (Summary Report). Cape Town: Publishers’ Association of South Africa. Figures 13 and 14. publishsa.co.za (PDF)
21. Vally, Z., Murray, L., Tomlinson, M., & Cooper, P. J. (2015). The impact of dialogic book-sharing training on infant language and attention: A randomized controlled trial in a deprived South African community. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 56(8), 865–873. doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12352
22. Klass, P., Miller-Fitzwater, A., High, P. C., & AAP Council on Early Childhood (2024). Literacy promotion: An essential component of primary care pediatric practice: Policy statement. Pediatrics, 154(6), e2024069090. doi.org/10.1542/peds.2024-069090
23. Massaro, D. W. (2015). Two different communication genres and implications for vocabulary development and learning to read. Journal of Literacy Research, 47(4), 505–527. doi.org/10.1177/1086296X15627528