Revisiting the prevalence of English: language use outside the home in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, we revisit the status of English relative to the African languages in South Africa by analysing new national data on the main language spoken outside the home. These data, which derive from the General Household Surveys of 2017 and 2018, complement commonly collected data on the main language spoken within the home. Our analysis shows that only a small minority of ‘Africans’ report speaking English most often outside the home, and that the large majority speak the same African language both inside and outside the home. These findings suggest that the dominance of English must be distinguished from its prevalence, and they point to the continued vitality of African languages in the country. In the latter part of the study, we discuss various reasons for these language patterns, including the continuing salience of residential segregation by race, changes in the labour market and the accompanying rise of the African middle-class, and the significance of African languages as markers of identity and resistance to the importance of English in domains of power.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".