Population and Language Demographics of Namibia

After pondering Namibian Kuchendeutsch, I was curious about the fact that German and English are both minority languages by far in Namibia but are still official languages, which led me to a curiosity about the demographics of the Namibian people. Here's what I found:

According to the CIA Factbook, 87.5% of Namibians are black, 6% white, and 6.5% mixed race. About half the population is of the Ovambo ethnic group, 9% Kavongo, 7% Herero, 7% Damara, 5% Nama, 4% Caprivian, 3% San, 2% Baster, and .5% Tswana. Namibia has 13 official languages, 10 indigenous African and 3 European.

Almost half the population speaks Oshivambo languages in their households. One tenth speaks Nama or Damara, and another tenth speaks Afrikaans, which is apparently the most common language for the population at large outside the household. Afrikaans is the household language of about 60% of white Namibians. About 8% speak Kavongo languages, another 8% speak Caprivi languages, and just 3.4% of the population speaks English in the household. Other African languages fill the remaining percentages.

Geographic language distribution courtesy of Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Namibia)

Given the linguistic diversity of Namibia and the fact that Afrikaans is the most commonly spoken language for daily business and cross-cultural communication, it seems to make very little sense for the country to retain English as its official language and the language taught in school. As noted in a previous post, the language policy of teaching English in schools can be really detrimental to education as many teachers themselves are not competent in the language. 

- Madelyn

Sources:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/wa.html

http://www.gov.na/languages-spoken

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/jan/10/namibia-english-crisis