South Africa has 12 official languages. But listen to South Africans talk to one another for long enough and you might wonder whether there isn't a 13th.
It has no dictionary, no official grammar and no language board. Nobody formally decided what belongs in it. Yet it is spoken every day in taxis and townships, classrooms and boardrooms, family kitchens and WhatsApp groups.
It borrows from isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English, Sesotho and other languages. It switches between them without warning, gives old words new meanings and turns linguistic misunderstandings into jokes.
It is not an official language but it may be one of the most distinctly South African things we have created.
And the internet is making it evolve faster than ever.
A language nobody invented
I have grown up hearing this language without ever really thinking about it. With a background that stretches from Namaqualand to Cape Town, I have always been surrounded by different ways of speaking, different expressions and those little phrases you never question because everyone around you knows exactly what they mean.
Someone switches into Afrikaans halfway through an English sentence. Someone else throws in an isiXhosa or isiZulu word. Nobody stops the conversation to translate. Somehow, we all just get it.
The strange thing about this 13th language is that nobody sat down and created it. It emerged from people living alongside one another.
South Africa's languages have been borrowing from each other for generations. People move between communities, work together, fall in love, trade, go to school, watch the same television programmes and increasingly share the same digital spaces.
Words travel with them.
Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB) CEO, Dr Keaobaka Seshoka, said moving between languages is a natural part of living in a multilingual society.
“Code-switching or translanguaging is a natural phenomenon in multilingual societies, as people are bilingual or multilingual,” Seshoka says.
But there is more happening here than simply making one another laugh.
In South Africa, that interaction happens naturally as people from different linguistic communities live, work and communicate alongside one another.
“South Africans have, over the years, developed a reputation online for using multiple languages in a single sentence,” she says.
That might sound ordinary to anyone who grew up here.
But linguistically, something interesting is happening.
“A word such as ‘bathong’, which is a Sesotho word, has now become such a common expression in all language groups to express shock, disbelief or being ‘speechless’,” she says.
The word has travelled. And once a word travels far enough, something changes. It stops belonging exclusively to the people who first used it. It becomes part of the shared vocabulary.
The South African sentence
Perhaps the clearest expression of this 13th language is not a particular word but a sentence.
English starts it. Afrikaans interrupts it. An isiZulu or isiXhosa word finishes it. Everyone understands. Nobody translates.
I have caught myself doing exactly this. A conversation can start in English, drift into Afrikaans, pick up a word from another language and somehow arrive at a joke that would make very little sense if you tried to translate it word for word.
And that is the nxa thing about South Africans. We don't just speak different languages. We seem to have become rather good at making them speak to one another.
This is one of the things that makes South African speech so difficult to capture in a dictionary. Meaning does not always sit inside an individual word. Sometimes it sits in the combination.
I remember doing this in primary school too, when the jokes were often so ridiculous that they were funny simply because we knew the trick. Someone would ask, “Sê gou, ambulans?” and when the other person repeated “ambulans”, the punchline would follow. It was a childish play on the sound of the word and an insult involving someone's mother, silly, immature and, at the time, absolutely hilarious. It probably would not have worked in English. That was precisely the point.
For Cape Town comedian Wayne McKay, that collision between languages is one of the foundations of South African humour.
His show "AfriSnaaks" has been described as a celebration of the quirks and playful nuances of Afrikaans and the Cape Flats, with McKay using language and storytelling to bring familiar community characters and experiences to the stage.
“I have always been fascinated by the way South Africans can turn an ordinary expression, accent, pronunciation, place name or everyday situation into something memorable and hilarious,” he says.
“Our humour often comes from the meeting of different languages, cultures and lived experiences. We may not always share the same background, but we frequently recognise the same phrases, rhythms, misunderstandings and social experiences and that recognition becomes the foundation for a joke.”
The joke works because the audience understands the collision.
When a word escapes its language
South Africans are particularly good at taking words out of their original homes.
Bathong is one example.
So are expressions such as eish, yebo, hawu and yoh, although their meanings and usage vary between communities and contexts.
Lekker, meanwhile, has travelled so extensively through South African English that many speakers barely experience it as a foreign word.
Indaba has similarly moved well beyond its original contexts and is now routinely used in English-language South African journalism, politics and business.
The important point is not that South Africans are “mixing languages badly”.
They are doing what languages have always done: borrowing, adapting and changing.
The difference is that South Africa has an unusually dense linguistic environment in which this happens constantly.
This linguistic blending is not entirely new. South Africa has been creating hybrid ways of speaking for generations.
On the mines, Fanagalo developed as a pidgin used to communicate across linguistic boundaries, drawing largely on Nguni languages while incorporating English and Afrikaans.
In the townships, Tsotsitaal emerged as an evolving urban vernacular, combining elements of Afrikaans and African languages.
Both have complicated histories, shaped by migration, labour, segregation and inequality. Neither was simply a “new language”; both were products of people finding ways to communicate in a multilingual society.
The joke is in the collision
Sometimes the mixing produces something even more distinctly South African: a joke that only works because we understand more than one linguistic world at once.
Benny McCarthy's infamous ma se p*es incident became a national joke because South Africans heard one thing while McCarthy offered another interpretation, saying “you mustn't push”.
The “wit kant” rugby saga produced another linguistic collision, after what was understood by some South Africans as the Afrikaans phrase for “white side” was heard very differently by others.
I remember how these kinds of moments work. I have heard it in family conversations, among friends and in those everyday exchanges where nobody needs to explain the joke because the words have already done the work. It got me thinking about how much of our humour lives in the way we speak and how often we probably don't even realise we're doing it.
The joke lands because there is already a shared understanding of the words, the accent or the cultural reference sitting underneath it.
These moments work because South Africans are accustomed to listening across languages.
We understand that a sound can mean one thing in one linguistic context and something completely different in another.
The misunderstanding becomes the joke. And sometimes the language itself becomes the joke.
A mô*rse klap can become a “movie se klap”. Calling someone a “Nigel” can become a creative way of saying they are a “n-a-a-i”.
These expressions are funny partly because they depend on shared cultural knowledge.
Someone outside South Africa may hear nonsense but a South African hears the punchline.
For Seshoka, that constant movement between languages helps create space for humour.
“Because South Africa is so multilingual and culturally diverse, we are constantly between languages. This creates a lot of room for creativity and wordplay,” she says.
Kaaps is perhaps the clearest example
Cape Town's Kaaps offers perhaps one of the clearest examples of what happens when languages spend centuries in close contact.
For me, this is also where the idea becomes personal. Cape Town is full of expressions that can sound completely ordinary to someone who grew up hearing them, but almost impossible to explain to someone who didn't.
Its vocabulary, rhythm and expressions reflect the many communities and languages that have shaped the Cape.
It is playful, expressive and deeply tied to identity.
But it also demonstrates something bigger.
Languages do not simply coexist. They change each other.
People borrow words because they need them, because they like them, because they make a joke work or because the borrowed word says something the original one does not.
Eventually, the borrowing can become so normal that people forget it was ever borrowed.
Social media is speeding everything up
For most of South African history, linguistic innovation travelled relatively slowly.
A word might move through a family, a neighbourhood, a school, a workplace or a city.
Now it can travel across the country before the people who created it have finished their lunch.
TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, X and television have created an enormous linguistic mixing bowl.
Seshoka says digital platforms have made those interactions even more immediate, allowing words and phrases to travel far beyond the communities where they originated.
“South Africans have, over the years, developed a reputation online for using multiple languages in a single sentence,” she says. “This includes our TV shows as well; many tend to be multilingual, with characters flowing from one language to the next in a single sentence.”
That changes the speed of language evolution.
A phrase can emerge in one community, be picked up by comedians or influencers, spread online and suddenly appear in conversations thousands of kilometres away.
The original meaning may shift. The pronunciation may change. The joke may become something else... and then another community takes it and changes it again.
More than slang
It would be easy to dismiss all this as slang, but that would miss what makes it interesting.
Language is one of the ways societies reveal how they are changing.
South Africa's linguistic mixing tells us something about how its people interact across historical, cultural and economic boundaries.
It shows that the country's communities are not as linguistically separate as the official list of languages might suggest.
There is another layer of communication underneath it.
A shared vocabulary, a shared sense of humour.
A collection of words that can cross cultural boundaries without anyone needing to announce that they have done so.
That may be the real 13th language.
Not a new language in the formal linguistic sense, but a constantly changing South African vernacular created by millions of people borrowing from one another.
The language we didn't plan
South Africa spent decades trying to recognise and protect its linguistic diversity. But alongside that formal project, ordinary South Africans were doing something else.
They were mixing, they were borrowing, they were adapting, they were making jokes.
And slowly, almost without anyone noticing, they were creating a shared way of speaking that belongs to no single language.
Maybe that is why I have never thought of it as a language before. It was simply how people around me spoke. The expressions were part of home, school, friends, family and everyday life. It was only when I started thinking about how differently we speak to one another that I realised how unusual it actually is
It has no official name, no fixed rules and it changes every time someone uses it.
Perhaps that is why it feels so unmistakably South African.
The country has 12 official languages. But somewhere between them, in the jokes, borrowed words, switched sentences and expressions we all somehow understand, its people may have created a 13th.
bernelee.vollmer@nationalmg.co.za