Since the post-apartheid government committed itself to upholding the nine official
indigenous languages and nurturing their development at the beginning of its rule, work has been done in setting up bodies such as the Pan South African Language Board and its associated provincial committees, and on developing policy. Yet this effort seems to have produced only bureaucratic results. People outside of these formal structures have not seen transformation relating to language beyond the broadcasts of news and some locally made programmes in indigenous languages on national television. Thus, in line with an unfortunate South African trend in many spheres of public life, we have extensive language policy
development, but do not enjoy the expected outcomes. Webb (2009) offers several possible explanations for this failure to deliver on language policy, including a lack of capacity and preparedness among those in positions where they could use the policies to effect their
desired ends, the association of the use of our different languages in education with apartheid,
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and the possibility that the speakers of indigenous languages do not support their use in place of English.
This last suggestion resonates with what Alexander (2006a, p 242) terms “static maintenance syndrome” in which people use their own languages in their families, homes, and
communities, but do not see in their languages the capacity for use as languages of learning and power. Many first-language speakers of indigenous South African languages reveal this attitude towards their mother tongue, and in it they typify Bourdieu‟s notion of symbolic domination (Bourdieu, 1991). We see people acquiescing, apparently voluntarily, to the disadvantage brought upon them by accepting as legitimate the assumed superior value of a dominant language. The “consent of the victims” has been a major factor in maintaining the status of English and Afrikaans in South Africa (Alexander, 2006b). Their perception of the relative values of dominant and indigenous languages in “the linguistic market” reflects and contributes substantially to the reality of this market. The attribution of higher status to all things associated with the colonisers of this country is linked with the habitual positioning, possibly in the minds of South Africans of all races, of black people in South Africa as quiescent recipients of perceived benevolence, who accept and believe in the difference in status, as potential agitators against dominance, who reject the difference in status, or as opportunistic agents, ready to use any available strategy to improve their circumstances.
This rather crass division possibly has some use in considering the practicalities of what people stand to gain and lose in accepting the dominance of English (and the marginalisation of indigenous languages), or in choosing to use their indigenous languages as languages of learning, commerce and power.
Alexander (2006b, p. 8) maintains that “In Africa ... the languages of the majority of the people have to become the dominant languages ... in the respective economy ... of the individual countries. Only if this happens will the danger of a two-tier citizen-subject social model be countered in favour of a democratic system where all are citizens and all have similar life chances.”
The sentiment is intuitively attractive, yet how could indigenous languages achieve
dominance in South Africa? Alexander writes of languages being “given market value”, and their enhancement of their instrumentality in “processes of production, exchange and
distribution” (Alexander, 2006b, p. 12), but it is difficult to imagine how this could be effected, even with government intervention. Even apartheid-era businesses, which went
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along willingly with policies of separate development found that, while the use of the distinct languages would have been useful for keeping a workforce divided and therefore more controllable, a lingua franca was necessary in workplaces such as mines. “Fanakalo”, a simplified language based mainly on Zulu root words and English grammar, evolved as a workplace medium of communication. In spite of attempts to phase it out (Matomela, 2011), it is still used extensively, albeit now much less stridently, from suburban kitchens to De Beers, because workers need to communicate with each other both on-duty and off, and many speak neither English nor Afrikaans, nor each other‟s languages (Madiba, 2011).
In public commercial activity, some banks offer users the choice of indigenous languages on their autobank screens, but this is a very small shift in the language market, and the only cost is one of investing in translation and some website maintenance. More substantial and potentially more influential shifts carry high costs and significant risks, for example, in the publishing industry. A common lament is that there is little published in indigenous
languages, and therefore not much available to read; less than 2% of the turnover for trade fiction and non-fiction books published in 2008 was from books in indigenous languages (Galloway and Struik, 2009). On the other hand, publishers are reluctant to publish books in indigenous languages because, historically, the demand for them has been low (Desai, 2010).
To remedy this situation, the government would need to subsidise the costs of publishing books in indigenous languages. Unfortunately, this is extremely unlikely, as even a petition to exempt books from value added tax was rejected in 2009. Just the same, one possible sign of increased reading in indigenous languages is a recent rapid increase in the sales of a daily Zulu language newspaper, Isolezwe. While sales of English newspapers fell by as much as 16% in 2010, Isolezwe has had a surge of popularity, increasing its sales in the same period by 3.5%. In 2011 it recorded sales of more than 100,000 papers daily (Timse, 2011).
Ultimately, people will live according to the language options that accord best with what they experience as most comfortable, and what brings them the most advantage. In Bourdieu‟s terms, they will, without deliberately shifting or preserving their language, choose whatever language use they are capable of that will best aid them in their pursuit of symbolic profit in interactions with other people, and in the society in which they live (Bourdieu, 1991).
In families who have moved into the suburbs and into English schools, parents commonly express concern in relation to their children‟s shift towards English, but they tend to accept it
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as inevitable, as illustrated in the following recorded interview with a fellow academic4 at the University of KwaZulu- Natal:
NM: I speak Zulu to them [my children] and I wish they spoke more Zulu than English ... My husband and I always speak Zulu to them – they respond in English most of the time. They do speak Zulu to each other. But they are more comfortable in English.
SL: What language will their children speak?
NM: Mmm! You know how worried I am about that! I think it will depend on who they marry. But if they get married to kids like them - I mean - they speak more English than Zulu. And it‟s not like we haven‟t made a conscious effort - we‟ve begged them, we‟ve bribed them, we‟ve paid them - when they were little we did everything we could in our power to make sure they spoke Zulu more often, but in the end … we would just throw up our hands ...
SL: What about reading in Zulu?
NM: There was a time when I was really worried about them reading Zulu ... I‟m glad they can [now] read Zulu. My husband and I get so surprised when we hear them reading - because there was a time when we just threw our hands up and thought Oh God! We‟ve really tried, it‟s not like we didn‟t try - we‟ve done everything we could in our power to make sure they speak isiZulu more often – when going to … my husband comes from a deep rural area near Richards Bay – we would say [to them] “When we get there, please, please, please just for a little!” and they would try – for like 30 minutes or so … then they would just go back to English … I used to be so embarrassed …because I used to hate it when I saw kids like those [when I was younger] – and during my time there weren‟t many. But I used to think how can they be speaking English when all of us are speaking Zulu? And I could not believe it when my kids did the same. I tried to organise my friend Maki to open up Zulu classes for my kids. Other parents were not as concerned as I was but they were concerned.
SL: Do you think the [Zulu] language will be lost?
NM: I can believe it when I look at my kids. But I hope I‟ll be around to be a Zulu
gogo [grandmother]. (Mthiyane, 2009)
4 This interview was of a colleague who took part of the pilot study reported on in Chapter 3. The interview covered her attitude to the changing use of isiZulu.
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