When 2+9=1: English and the Politics of Language Planning in a Multilingual Society South Africa
In: The Politics of English as a World LanguageSearch for other papers by Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu in
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Abstract
This essay reflects on South Africa’s new language policy and efforts currently being made to implement it. It notes that there is a mismatch between the language policy and the language practices in most of the country’s institutions. The policy promotes additive multilingualism; but the practices show a steady trend towards unilingualism in English at the expense of the other official languages including Afrikaans and nine African languages. The essay argues that this mismatch derives from a number of factors, some of them internal and others external to the policy, which interact in complex ways to impede policy implementation. The essay discusses some of these factors, with a focus on the ambivalent language-related clauses in the policy on the one hand, and the legacy of apartheid-based Bantu education on the other. As a way forward, it is suggested that, for the new language policy to achieve its primary goal to promote the status of the official indigenous languages, the whole enterprise of language policy and planning should be viewed as a marketing problem, one that can only be solved if the ‘product’ to be marketed, language, is “backed by the right promotion and put in the right place at the right price” (Cooper 1989: 72).