Fanagalo

Fanagalo
Pidgin Zulu
RegionSouthern Africa-All mining regions of South Africa
SpeakersL1: none (2022)[1]
L2 speakers: 5,000[1]
Dialects
  • Chilapalapa
  • Zulu
Language codes
ISO 639-3fng
Glottologfana1235
S40A[2]
Linguasphere99-AUT-fh

Fanagalo, or Fanakalo, is a vernacular or pidgin based primarily on Zulu with input from English and a small amount of Afrikaans input.[3] It is used as a lingua franca, mainly in the gold, diamond, coal and copper mining industries in South Africa and to a lesser extent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Although it is used as a second language only, the number of speakers was estimated as "several hundred thousand" in 1975. By the time independence came–or in the case of South Africa, universal suffrage–English had become sufficiently widely spoken and understood that it became the lingua franca, enabling different ethnic groups in the same country to communicate with each other, and Fanagalo use declined.

  1. ^ a b Fanagalo at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
  2. ^ Jouni Filip Maho, 2009. New Updated Guthrie List Online
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).