Introduction

This chapter focuses on bilingual children simultaneously acquiring English and isiXhosa in Cape Town, South Africa. We aim to describe the typical speech acquisition of three-year-old children acquiring both these languages. The chapter starts by providing background regarding the language and demographics of South Africa, together with a rationale for why it is important, but challenging, to identify children with speech sound disorders in this context. This is followed by a description of the two languages. We then move into a review of the literature on monolingual acquisition of isiXhosa and South African English before considering our data from bilingual children.

South Africa is characterized by a culturally and linguistically diverse population. Our progressive constitution recognizes 11 official languages and advocates equal status for them all. These 11 languages include nine indigenous Bantu languages: isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sepedi, Setswana, Sesotho, Xitsonga, Siswati, Tshivenda and isiNdebele, together with the West Germanic languages of English and Afrikaans. Of course there are many more languages and dialects spoken beyond the officially recognized ones, especially by people who have immigrated to South Africa from neighbouring countries. Multilingualism is common in South Africa, with the exact combinations of languages and dialects spoken varying from region to region. In the Western Cape, the main languages spoken are Afrikaans (spoken by 49.7% of the population), isiXhosa (spoken by 24.7%) and English (spoken by 20.3%) (Statistics South Africa, 2011).

The rich linguistic diversity of Southern Africa offers many exciting research opportunities, yet the study of speech acquisition in this context remains relatively unresearched. Some of the Bantu languages, such as Sesotho, isiXhosa and isiZulu, now have small datasets and several papers documenting typical speech acquisition. Much of this work has focused on monolingual children, and where bior multilingual children have been investigated, the children's language exposure and abilities across all their languages have not been well documented.