Language Research

6. Language in everyday life: The use of language in everyday life, e.g. education, broadcasting, and other

The Constitutions recognition of 11 official languages influenced a new language policy in general and further education. According to a statement from the Minister of Education on July 14, 1997, new languages in education policy were an integral and necessary aspect of the new government’s strategy of building a non-racial society in South Africa. This policy has to overcome the barriers of color, language and religion and to create an environment of respect. He defined being South African as being multilingual.

SHOOLS

Schools in South Africa must promote multilingualism, however, a learner has the right to choose the language of instruction. When a school uses the language chosen by the learner and there is a place available in the relevant grade, the school must accept the learner. However, when no school offers the desired language, or less than 40 students in grades 1 to 6 or less than 35 students in grades 7 to 12 are interested in the studying in a certain language, the head of the provincial Department of Education will determine how the needs of those learners will be met. The provisions of the Constitution, and in particular the need to achieve equity, as well as to redress past discriminatory practices and behavior have to be taken into account. This policy was formally reviewed in 1999 in order to map the progress made in this regard.

In 1998 matriculates needed to pass only one official language and any other language of their choice. University students needed to pass two official languages. Many students do not want to have African languages as mediums of instruction because there is no terminology available (62% of parents in Cape Town want their children to be educated in English). On the other hand, English is not the first language of 92% of learners, so according to some people, it should not be used as a language of instructions as well.

PARLIAMENT

As for the use of languages in the Parliament, it was proposed in 1998 that four languages should be used in Parliament, not just English. This proposal raised a storm of protests among those, who want English to be the sole language in Parliament. Although South Africa promotes multilingualism, in 1996 copies of the Constitution were not available in any other language but English. People can use their mother tongue in the court but all written records are in English.

Supporters of traditional languages suggested omitting Afrikaans as the second language in Parliament. Documents should be in English and “the language of the month” (each month, a different language from among the African languages - proposal from 1998).

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Updated (September 2002)

According to the LANGTAG Report, there are eighty languages spoken in South Africa.

Table below contains the numbers of speakers of the main South African languages.

Besides those languages, Portuguese is said to be spoken by 57,080 people; Hindi by 25,900; Gujarati by 25,120; Tamil by 24,720; Greek by 16,780; Italian by 16,600; Urdu by 13,280; German by 11,740; Dutch by 11,740; French by 6,340 and Telegu by 4,000 people.

Although there is no general national lingua franca, English is the major language in the country, being almost solely used in formal public communication. Afrikaans is still used in the workplace and the Bantu languages are used only for low-level functions, such as personal interaction, cultural expression and religious practice.

Afrikaans has the widest geographical, demographic and racial distribution, with 81.4 percent of the so-called colored community (South Africans of “mixed” racial origin), 57.7 percent of the white population, 1.5 percent of the Indian population and 0.7 percent of the black population using it at home. English is mainly an urban language, being used in most of the major cities of the country. The Bantu languages, on the other hand, are spoken mainly by black South Africans as home languages (1996 census), with reasonably well-defined geographical distributions.

The majority of black South Africans are functionally highly multilingual (they probably speak about four languages each), and the rest of the population is at least bilingual, knowing Afrikaans and English.

Concerning the knowledge of the country’s languages among South Africans, the following observations can be made:

• Knowledge of the Bantu languages as primary and non-primary languages is largely restricted to black South Africans

   

• English is probably known by more than 50 percent of the SA population at a very basic level of communication and Afrikaans by about 40 percent

Concerning proficiency in Afrikaans and English among black South Africans, a recent sociolinguistic survey commissioned by “PanSALB” (2001) reported that 49 percent of their respondents often did not understand or seldom understood speeches in English. This lack of English language proficiency rose to 60 percent among speakers of Tswana, Ndebele and Venda, particularly among less educated respondents, respondents in rural areas and semi-skilled or unskilled communities.

The lack of English comprehension skills is also apparent in informal contexts. Respondents rated their ability to follow a story on radio or television in English as follows: Zulu - 32 percent, Sotho - 28 percent, Swazi - 27 percent, Tsonga - 24 percent, Xhosa - 24 percent, Pedi - 19 percent, Tswana - 14 percent, Ndebele - 3 percent and Venda - 0 percent.

Source: World Congress on Language Policies, Barcelona, April 16-20, 2002, “Language Policy Development in South Africa,” by V. N. Webb, Center for Research in the Politics of Language, University of Pretoria, http://www.linguapax.org/congres/taller/taller3/webb.html

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