Languages South African students want to be taught in: English, then Afrikaans, then Zulu, then Xhosa

A site here gives some interesting yet unsurprising numbers on the preferences of South African students. The site has an auto-loading video ad so beware of that if you want to read the article.

The numbers become interesting when contrasted with language-at-home usage.

English: 9.6% spoken at home, 65% preferred by students
Afrikaans: 13.5% spoken at home, 10% preferred by students
Zulu: 22.7% spoken at home, 7.5% preferred by students
Xhosa: 16% spoken at home, 6.6% preferred by students

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Link roundup for 24 January 2012

--- First of all from the department of I told you so: this article on possible cooperation between NASA, Russia and the ESA on moon colonization. Aside from the terrible launch windows to Mars, the fact that the moon is the only area that so-called second-tier spacefaring nations can help to colonize will make it the inevitable choice for first permanent manned colonization. In other words, if the US is not interested in colonizing the moon then it will end up watching other countries do it before it launches its planned Mars flyby in the mid-2030s.


--- Twitter is opening its third office in Europe, this time in Germany. Found about it here in Spanish.

--- The CPLP (Community of Portuguese Language Countries) is looking at sending some sort of joint mission to Guinea-Bissau. From here also in Spanish.

--- Xhosa, Zulu being axed at state schools - "Last year, 68455 matrics countrywide wrote Afrikaans as their first additional language, whereas only 10943 wrote Zulu and a mere 1547 wrote Xhosa." Chock full of comments below, as is always the case with articles of this nature.

--- Cape Town's new fully bilingual talk radio.

--- Incoherent party, incoherent candidates. The Economist on the current state of the GOP in the United States.

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Link roundup for 12 January 2012

Let's start with Dawn orbiting Vesta.

--- While there is no major news besides the fact that Dawn is in its closest orbit to the minor planet, it's interesting to note that even before leaving Vesta, Dawn is slowly approaching Ceres as well. At the moment the distance between the two is 0.9843 AU, compared to about 1.7 AU at closest approach from Earth.

--- A review of an interesting looking book called The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims.


--- An article on Namibia's language policy: "Harris said the post-independence adoption of English was "a challenging decision", because "only 8% [of Namibians] are English speakers, whereas the rest of the population use their home language and Afrikaans as the language of communication in their daily lives"."

--- An article on the worst school in the Cape, with an 18.9% metric pass rate: "Of the 40 pupils who sat for their matric exams last year, 26 spoke Xhosa, 12 spoke Afrikaans and the rest had English as a first language."

--- An exoplanet with rings has been discovered, and it seems to be something like a massive version of Saturn, though further observations will need to be conducted to determine exactly how massive it is: "The outermost ring stretches up to 37 million miles (60 million km) away from the body it encircles. If the rings are similar to Saturn's, their combined mass is probably as much as eight times that of Earth's moon."

Eight times that of our moon = 10% of the Earth, or about the mass of Mars.

--- The general election in the United States is approaching, which means that the Spanish ads are going to get more and more frequent. Romney just put one out in Florida:



--- Finally, an article in Portuguese (automatically translated here) on BRICS countries and the new international equilibrium.

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