South Africa: Proper use of mother tongue the way forward

[Francis Hult]

Via lgpolicy...

Proper use of mother tongue the way forward

In this article in our series, Neville Alexander, director of the
project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa at the
University of Cape Town, argues that to ignore the language issue is
to entrench the domination of powerful elites. South Africa has
arguably the most progressive language policy on paper. This fact is
acknowledged by most people who are familiar with the sociology and
the politics of language.
 n spite of this, however, if one reads only the Afrikaans press, one
would have to conclude that this language policy is a total failure
and that we are moving rapidly to a situation where the de facto sole
official language is the "hated" Queen's English.

The reader would be surprised, therefore, to hear that some of us hold
the unpalatable view that, because of what we call our "languish
policy", this country is in fact simply carrying out in practice a
neo-apartheid language policy. For, in spite of the fact that
Afrikaans is being driven out of many domains of social life and being
replaced by English, it is still the most favoured official language
next to English. Why is language policy important? And why is it a bad
idea that we should all be forced to operate in English only when we
transact business or are involved in any public domain?

Full story:
This article was originally published on page 9 of The Cape Times on
April 21, 2008

 http://www.eltworld.net/news/tag/use-of-english-in-south-africa/


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