Praat or speak but don't thetha: On language rights in South Africa

Abstract

This paper looks at the question of language rights in a changing South Africa. It has been divided into two sections. The first section looks broadly at the issue of human rights in general and language rights in particular. The second section looks specifically at South Africa by providing an overview of the language situation inside the country, a situation which privileges particular tongues, before looking at the language clauses in the African National Congress (ANC) draft Bill of Rights and suggested amendments submitted by Robin Trew and Zubeida Desai to the Constitutional Committee of the ANC. In motivating these amendments we argue that language rights need to be separated from cultural rights if we are to take account of the crucial role language plays in enabling or disabling people to participate fully in political, social and economic affairs of the country.

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