My 'ex' was ground staff for SAA. In those days (early 1980's) they got an allowance for each language over and above the two national languages, which were Afrikaans and Afrikaans and Afrikaans (and 'n bietjie Engels), plus one foreign language. She spoke 5 languages and her allowance was a grand total of ZAR 6. Yes, 6 rand! Admittedly in those days you could get a meal for 6 rand, whereas now it's not even the price of a beer.
South Africa was a bilingual country, or tweetaalig as they said. So if you spoke Afrikaans and you was able to string togevver a few words of Engels how bad your aksent were wasn't mattering, you was officially buy-ling-yew-al.
Those were the days.