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<h1 class="gmail-post_title">A court decision with consequences for languages in HE</h1>
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<p style="text-align:justify">The 26 April decision of the Gauteng
High Court in Pretoria upholding English-only courses at the University
of South Africa is yet another sign that Afrikaans is losing its status
in post-apartheid South Africa. It remains to be seen whether the
court’s multilingual turn and conciliatory tone will influence
university policies and future court decisions on language rights.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">Language has long been a contested
terrain in South Africa. In recent years, some of the fiercest battles
have been fought in universities over attempts to eliminate Afrikaans
instruction in favour of an English-only programme. The rights group,
AfriForum, has repeatedly charged that these policies violate the South
African Constitution. The group met a major defeat in December 2017 in a
Constitutional Court ruling supporting the decision of the University
of the Free State to provide all instruction in English.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">Significant programmatic differences
left open the possibility of a different judicial outcome in the case
against UNISA. The Pretoria court, however, thought otherwise, but under
an unexpected line of reasoning with potential policy implications.</p><div class="gmail-code-block gmail-code-block-1" style="margin:8px 8px 8px 0px;float:left">
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<p style="text-align:justify">A unique parallel programme</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">UNISA is a ‘distance learning
institution’. Students from all over South Africa and beyond take
courses online. Responding to decreasing student demand, beginning in
2010, the university incrementally limited the number of courses in
Afrikaans until it totally eliminated them in 2016.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">As in other universities with parallel
language programmes, English-taught courses have typically been the
choice of black students who view English as the language of
emancipation and Afrikaans as the language of oppression. Though many of
them may have attended English-language primary and secondary schools,
English is not necessarily their home language.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">An increasing number of
Afrikaans-speaking students, who may be white or coloured (mixed race),
have also chosen English instruction for better access to jobs in the
global economy. A shrinking number still clings to Afrikaans for
ideological or sentimental reasons as part of their core identity.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">To get a sense of what UNISA intended in
adopting the new policy, a look at the ‘preamble’ is useful. Here the
policy talks about “mother-tongue-based multilingual education” as “an
ideal that must be the ultimate goal”. And though the policy recognises
that the “time span to achieve that goal” might extend into “future
generations”, the University had to take “practical steps … now … to
start on that road”. Among the stated principles shaping the policy are
“human dignity”, “equality” and the “recognition that indigenous African
languages have been historically disadvantaged”.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">While all instruction in undergraduate
courses would be in English, the university would provide supportive
services like multilingual glossaries, tutoring and translations for
basic study materials in all remaining official languages, including
Afrikaans. Moving forward, it would offer a “selected number” of modules
and programmes in more than one official language based on “capacity”.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">Postgraduate research students would be
allowed to write their proposals, theses and dissertations in any
official language so long as appropriate supervision is available.
Students already in the programme would have until 2019 to complete
their coursework in Afrikaans.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><strong>Constitutional principles</strong></p><div class="gmail-code-block gmail-code-block-2" style="margin:8px 8px 8px 0px;float:left">
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<p style="text-align:justify">AfriForum has claimed procedural
irregularities in the way UNISA approved the policy, which could or
could not prove persuasive on appeal. The court’s resolution of the
substantive constitutional claims and its underlying reasoning, however,
are especially compelling and potentially far-reaching.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">The 1996 South African Constitution is
considered one of the most progressive in the world on language rights
and language use. It designates 11 official languages including English,
Afrikaans and nine indigenous African languages, which “must enjoy
parity and esteem and be treated equally”.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">It also grants to all “the right to
receive education in the official language or languages of their choice
in public educational institutions”. Yet that right is not unqualified.
Learning in the language of choice must be “reasonably practicable”,
taking into account “equity, practicality and the need to redress the
results of past discriminatory laws and practices”.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">Though this sounds like a tall order for
a country with such a troubled past, the Constitutional Court has added
a contextual gloss that leaves some discretion in the hands of
education officials though subject to judicial oversight.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">The South African Constitutional Court
on several occasions has interpreted these provisions, most recently in
the UFS ruling, which the Pretoria court used as its “starting point”.
Critical differences in the facts, however, gave the court space to
chart a rationale that focused less on “redress” of past wrongs, while
acknowledging them, and more decidedly on “equity” and “practicality” in
allocating limited resources across all African languages and favouring
English as chosen by an overwhelming majority of students.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">At UFS the parallel programme arguably
separated students on the basis of race. Primarily black students
enrolled in the English stream, while white Afrikaners as well as
coloured students enrolled in the considerably smaller Afrikaans stream.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">The majority opinion weighed heavily on
the physical separateness of the programme. It was all about the harms
of racial separation and the implicit force of English as a unifying
neutral language. The subtext was about the symbolic association of
Afrikaans with the racially motivated wrongs of apartheid.</p></div></div>
<br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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