I'm collecting opinion articles on SA language policy

The unfounded fears of a Zulu hegemony by T.O. Molefe

Quote:

Mabuza’s comment underlines what has perhaps been the most surprising aspect of the reaction, which is that some of the backlash has, for various reasons, come from black South Africans against what is perceived as an act of Zulu domination.

I'm thinking articles like these would be useful for critical discourse analysis, though of course the first article I come across has to be one of which I share the outlook.

So is this one: KZN University: A Storm in a (Zulu) Teacup by Pierre de Vos (whose blog happens to be my home page), although I don't fully support his stance on Stellenbosch as an Afrikaans-medium university seeing as how Afrikaans is itself threatened by English dominance as well. It should make space for black students, probably through steering away from Afrikaans only, but it wouldn't be unfair to ask the students to take a class in Afrikaans along the side. Vice-versa the university can offer isiXhosa classes to the Afrikaans-speaking students. The ideal, I believe, would be to have a number of multilingual universities throughout the country, each of which has a main emphasis on the language that is dominant in the particular region but also offers courses in the second and third language of the region. I haven't yet figured out how to make this workable.

Link to a page on the actual language policy considerations of the University of Stellenbosch (in Afrikaans).


UL multilingualism

The new KwaZulu-Natal University policy is not unlike the policy of the University of Luxembourg, which I will be visiting next week for a conference. In their founding text (from 2003) it stipulates that multilingualism is one of the main founding principles:

 « le fonctionnement de l’université se fonde sur (…) le caractère multilingue de son enseignement ». Les langues de l’Université sont : le français, l’anglais et l’allemand.

Le multilinguisme est un point essentiel du développement stratégique de l’UL car il peut apporter l’atout unique d’un diplôme bilingue, ce qui est un créneau indéniable et abordable du fait du contexte multilingue dont bénéficie l’UL : Luxembourg pays aux trois frontières, au cœur de l’Europe, abritant de nombreuses institutions européennes. Le multilinguisme apparaît comme un élément incontournable, voire même central de la renommée internationale de l’UL.

What they're saying is that because of Luxembourg being geographically wedged in between France, Germany and Belgium and its central position in Europe (again, mostly geographical), multilingualism is "inescapable".

In fact, the UL goes much further. All courses are in fact taught in German, French and English and by the time you graduate, fluency in all three is expected. Moreover the staff need to be able to converse in Lëtzebuergesch as well in order to facilitate interaction with students.


Conversational languages

The difference is of course that there is a plethora of universities teaching in any of the UL's three languages already, whereas isiZulu and isiXhosa are more like Lëtzebuergesch: the native language of the majority of the population of the region where the university is situated, but seen as a language of conversation rather than writing, or god forbid, universitary teaching.(I'm not sure whether UKZN staff are required to be able to hold a conversation in isiZulu; I believe that that is in fact one of the purposes of their new policy.)