Here in South Africa, my grandson is my co-informant. He explains to me many of the things I don't understand. One of these is language. South Africa has 11 official languages, and although some of them are similar, others have very different vocabularies and grammatical structures. Many of the African languages are what is called 'agglutinative' - words are built up of several meanings, and change according to what is being said. It is common for people to be multilingual, even if they are illiterate. Languages are picked up by ear, and there is a lot of 'code switching', when people swap languages mid-sentence, or add words or phrases from one language to another.
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