[LINK] "State must work to save our languages"

[rfmcdpei]

Solani Ngobeni, letter-writer to South Africa's Times, writes about the challenges facing South Africa's languages. Under various segregationist rules, first English then Afrikaans were imposed on the wider population. Why can't it be the turn of South Africa's other languages?

Given that we are now in power, can we use this leverage to develop

Comments

[mindstalk]

URL:
"South African Airways, the national carrier, must be one of few state-owned airlines on which passengers are not greeted in a dominant indigenous language."

CIA on SA languages:
"IsiZulu 23.8%, IsiXhosa 17.6%, Afrikaans 13.3%, Sepedi 9.4%, English 8.2%, Setswana 8.2%, Sesotho 7.9%, Xitsonga 4.4%, other 7.2% (2001 census)"
Though Wiki says Zulu and Xhosa are mutually intelligible, which gets you up to 41%. Still have to decide which one to use on the airline.

URL "First, our constitution fudged the language issue by declaring all 11 languages as official." ! Wiki says South Africa is the only country to try that hard.

"But have we ever asked ourselves why Chinese and Japanese political leaders insist on using their indigenous languages?"

Probably because for them it's "language", not "languages". Well, not quite true for China, but not as complex, either.

[rfmcdpei]

It's not difficult to imagine that given the advatnage of English and especially Afrikaans over the other nine South African official lasnguages, spoken by poor people with little media or government support and very extensive dealings with people of other ethnic backgrounds, there could be a shift over to English. That's happened, with French, in Côte d'Ivoire.

[mindstalk]

I wasn't challenging that scenario. I was challenging the feasibility or wisdom of trying to do something about it. Are the airline safety instructions to be given 11 times, one in each language? If not, which official languages are you privileging over others? And can you get speakers of 11 languages onto all your planes? Do you give the instructions in Zulu and Xhosa, which are intelligible, boring the passengers? If not, which do you choose?

[rfmcdpei]

Sorry, I meant to agree with you.