Full country name
The Republic of South Africa

Area
1,233,404 sq km

Population
41 million

Capital city
Pretoria (administrative capital);

Seat of parliament
Cape Town

Seat of high court
Bloemfontein

People
75% black, 13% white (60% of whites are of Afrikaner descent, most of the rest are of British descent), 8% mixed race, 3% of Indian descent.

Languages
South Africa has eleven official languages; Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, North Sotho, South Sotho, Swati, Tsonga, Vends, Xhosa and Zulu. Most people speak English pretty well and it is only in the remote rural areas that you may find people who don’t understand it at all.

Africaan is one of the important languages. French, German and Italian are also spoken at some of the larger hotels.

The African continent has huge socio-linguistic complexity: more than half the world's surviving languages are found there and over 5,000 language names have been identified in sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa has nine major African languages, which are spoken by 67 per cent of the country's population of 40 million, but not until the achievement of majority rule in 1994 did these languages have official status, which previously had been reserved for Afrikaans and English.
Africaan is one of the youngest Germanic languages. For example, other Germanic languages are English, German and Dutch. Africaan originated from Dutch when Dutch people settled at the Cape in South Africa over 300 years ago and became mixed with sailors, slave and inland tribe language. Therefore, Africaan is very similar to Dutch and contains many words, phrases and grammatical constructs of it. 
For a long time the people called their language Dutch, although both languages had not much in common any longer, until 1925 when the government proclaimed Africaan as a real and the official language of South Africa. 
Africaan is spoken mainly in Southern Africa that means in Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and especially in South Africa. Currently about 50 million people in the world speak Africaan as their first language. 


Religion
Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and traditional religions.

Government
Republic 

GDP
US$146 billion

GDP per head
US$3,395

Annual growth
0.9%

Inflation
9%

Major industries
Mining, finance, insurance, food processing
Major trading partners: USA, UK, Germany, Japan, Italy

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