⚡ Programming Languages in South Africa

Programming languages are sets of instructions, syntax, and rules used by developers to create software such as applications and websites.

South Africa is an African country with a population of over 60 million people.

According to our research, programming languages are detected on 82.5% of websites from South Africa.

Statistics based on 18K+ analyzed websites. About this data

⭐ Most Popular in 2026

The following chart shows the top programming languages on websites in South Africa in 2026, based on market share.

The most popular is JavaScript with an impressive share of 93.6%, followed by PHP with 76.1% and C# with 5.3%.

JavaScript 93.6%
PHP 76.1%
C# 5.3%
Lua 3.6%
Ruby 3.6%
Scala 1.2%
Java 1.2%
TypeScript 0.9%
ASP 0.7%
Python 0.3%
Go 0.1%
Perl 0.06%
CFML 0.03%
Elixir 0.01%
Dart 0.01%

🚀 Highlights

Here is a list of the top languages that are more popular in South Africa than worldwide.
Differences between global and country rankings are shown in parentheses.

6. Scala ^(-2)
8. TypeScript ^(-1)
11. Go ^(-1)
12. Perl ^(-1)
14. Elixir ^(-1)
15. Dart ^(-2)

✨ Best Programming Languages

Below is a more detailed list of 16 programming languages used on sites from South Africa, ranked by their market share.

Rank	Name	Market share
1	JavaScript Austin, Texas, United States An interpreted programming language and a core technology of the web, alongside HTML and CSS, used to add interactivity and logic to websites and web applications.	93.6%
2	PHP A widely used server-side scripting language for building dynamic web applications.	76.1%
3	C# Redmond, Washington, United States A high-level, statically typed, object-oriented programming language developed for the .NET platform.	5.3%
4	Lua Rio de Janeiro, Brazil A lightweight scripting language designed primarily for embedded use in applications.	3.6%
5	Ruby Matsue, Japan An interpreted, object-oriented, open-source programming language designed for simplicity and productivity, commonly used for web development.	3.6%
6	Scala Lausanne, Switzerland An object-oriented programming language designed to improve and address the limitations of Java.	1.2%
7	Java Austin, Texas, United States A multi-platform, object-oriented programming language first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995, designed to run across different systems through the Java Virtual Machine.	1.2%
8	TypeScript Redmond, Washington, United States A high-level programming language developed by Microsoft that adds optional static typing and advanced language features to JavaScript for building complex applications.	0.9%
9	ASP Redmond, Washington, United States A server-side scripting language and dynamic web page engine. FreeLegacy	0.7%
10	Python Wilmington, Delaware, United States A high-level, general-purpose programming language that is dynamically typed and widely used for scripting, automation, data analysis, and machine learning.	0.3%
11	Go Mountain View, California, United States A high-level, statically typed, compiled programming language developed at Google for building efficient, scalable software and backend services.	0.1%
12	Perl A high-level, scripting, dynamically typed programming language.	0.06%
13	CFML San Jose, California, United States A scripting language for web development, usually associated with Adobe ColdFusion.	0.03%
14	Elixir A dynamic, functional programming language that compiles to bytecode for the Erlang virtual machine and is designed for building scalable, fault-tolerant applications.	0.01%
15	Dart Mountain View, California, United States An object-oriented, class-based, garbage-collected programming language developed by Google for building cross-platform applications from a single codebase.	0.01%
16	Erlang Stockholm, Sweden A high-level functional programming language designed for building concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems.	0.007%

👉 See Also

🌎 Programming Languages in other countries

🗃️ About This Data

We evaluate the popularity of technologies based on the number of websites where we detect their usage.
Technologies without a detectable web footprint, and those we do not track, are not reflected in the calculated market share.
This report is based on the analysis of 18,406 websites from South Africa.
We currently track the presence of 23 programming languages across the web.
Of these, 16 were detected on websites from South Africa.
Statistics were last calculated on May 8, 2026.
For more details, see our methodology and disclaimer.