Recovering multilingualism: recent language-policy developments

Abstract

BACKGROUND Language-policy developments in South Africa have undergone dramatic changes over the last decade. Explicit statements of policy have shifted away from the segregationist mould of the previous apartheid government with the widely divergent roles and functions it ascribed to the various languages of the country. There is now a move towards principles that espouse the equal status and functions of eleven of the country's languages in addition to the promotion of respect for, and use of, other languages. The extraordinary circumstances surrounding the political negotiations that led to a sharing of power after the country's first democratic elections of 1994 created the opportunity for ‘proposals from below’ (from civil society), to take root in a manner which has never before been possible in South Africa. Many of the proposals for new language policy have been accepted on an official level and an encouraging, optimistic environment seemed, in the early years of the new government of national unity, to promise a vibrant future for language development and multilingualism. In the era of globalisation, however, there are larger structural forces at play, which influence international and domestic economic and development policies. These forces are generally antithetical to multilingualism. It should therefore not be surprising that tensions in language-policy development are beginning to manifest themselves. In part, these tensions are discernible in other multilingual societies, particularly in Africa; in part they are peculiar to South Africa.

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