If you want to be a civil servant, you must know at least one indigenous language. That's the proposal of a language expert, who says most South Africans still believe that speaking English improves their status.
If you want to be a civil servant, you must know at least one indigenous language. That's the proposal of a language expert, who says most South Africans still believe that speaking English improves their status.
It's a perception that's hardly surprising, says Chris Swepu, Acting CEO for the Pan South African Language Board, when English is the language mostly used in Parliament itself, despite the fact that translation services are provided.
“The government needs to use and create space for indigenous languages in order to inspire the youth," said Swepu, who also holds educational institutions responsible for the poor-relative status of African languages. "English is seen as a language of the elite,” he said.
“University management doesn't allocate sufficient resources to the business of languages," Swepu said. Professor Russell Kaschula, Head of the School of Languages at Rhodes University, however, believes it's not educational institutions, but the speakers of African languages, who held the key to their survival. “No one ever voluntarily gives up their language – that is at least what history teaches us,"said Kaschula.
"So, in a sense, the key to the survival of the said languages is held by the speakers themselves," Kaschula said. “They need to use it, intellectualise it and make these languages visible.”
In this respect, the role of parents was crucial. "Parents need to be re-educated as to the value of mother-tongue-based bilingual methods, in which people use African languages as a medium of instruction, while learning English at the same time," Kaschula said.
In response to Swepu's assertion that there weren't enough opportunities for graduates of African language studies, Kaschula said that while job opportunities for graduates in African languages existed, there needed to be a drive by universities and the national Department of Education to show students what they were.
"Jobs such as editor, translator, language practitioner, journalist, television presenter, and many more,” he said. What tertiary institutions did need to do, Kaschula said, was to develop relevant technologies so that indigenous languages could be used in schools and higher education institutions.
Kaschula's home language is English, yet he speaks isiXhosa so fluently that many native isiXhosa speakers might be envious. He believes that while the right policies are in place, they are not being implemented properly – partly because of a lack of funding.
“The Department of Education needs to think carefully about this. At the moment it’s the Department of Arts and Culture that’s making an effort at postgraduate level, and the education department needs to put more money into both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.”
Thandeka Mapi, a lecturer in African Languages at Rhodes, said African language teaching needed to be in line with the changes taking place in the work place and other areas of society. “That can only be achieved through changing the curriculum and by designing courses and subjects that will allow market-related studies in African languages,"Mapi said.
Swepu said to improve the status of African languages, all universities should have language policies that reflected the spirit of the Constitution, budgets for language development and stricter monitoring of how policies were implemented. Young people needed to be "mobilised" to study African languages.
Part of this encouragement was seeing these languages getting official recognition – not just in policies, but in practice. "It should be a prerequisition to get a job in the government that one should know at least know one indigenous language," Swepu said. “Society is still trapped in the notion that to speak English makes you better."
