The S.A. government has decreed that there will be no Afrikaans-only universities in the new dispensation. Of course, there aren't any now, anyway. Go figure. The article is in Mail&Guardian online. No, I dunno how to post the url.
Here's an article that lists the number of SA students with various different "home" languages: Cabinet briefed on language policy. English: 32% (192,466) Afrikaans: 16% (99,342) IsiZulu: 11% (67,643) IsiXhosa: 11% (66,643) Others: 6% or less
I wonder what the long term future is for the Afrikaaner people. If any. Will most of them gradually be absorbed into the English speaking community, either in SA or wherever they emigrate, with the eventual loss of their language and traditions? That would be a tragedy in my opinion.
The last time I checked there were still selected degree programs at Stellenbosch and Witswatersrand that were Afrikaans only while the university as a whole was multilingual. The the new ruling allow this practice to continue? Jack
I believe that, at Stellenbosch, the undergraduate programs in Theology are taught in Afrikaans, while MTh courses are taught exclusively in the medium of English. Cory Seibel
Hello Their future in South Africa does not look very promising. 'Kill the Boer, kill the farmer' Death chant at ANC funeral leads to more murder of whites -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: July 28, 2002 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Anthony C. LoBaido © 2002 WorldNetDaily.com http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28421 I doubt they have a future in South Africa, when you have ANC leaders who say things like: "When Mandela dies we will kill you whites like flies." (African National Congress Councillor, Mzukizi Gaba, 10th November 1997) Not to mention the statements made in the article I included above. The Afrikaners are a rugged group of people but it looks like their best chance for a peaceful life and the security of their families is to leave South Africa which would mean a large number of them assimilating into English speaking countries and possibly losing their culture and language over time.
If anybody who is anybody in SA is really serious about making one of the black languages into a language of research and university discourse, then the nettle ought to be grasped of how many languages there really are. It was and is politically advantageous to emphasize small differences, elevating dialects into languages. I am not a professional linguist, but I know enough about the history of languages to suggest that perpetuating the division between Northern and Southern Sotho or between Zulu and siSwati may not be serviceable--if university level use is valued above folkloric and ethnic-pandering purposes. The same might apply to other of the black languages. Who, after all, fails to recognize that the standardization and elevation to academic levels of Afrikaans was a conscious, deliberate, "political" process? The world is richer for it. If a similar process happens with one or more of the black languages--and it is not a mere isolationist stratagem--the world would be richer for that as well. Personally, I lament the expulsion of Low German from print media by Luther's Bible and the standardization of "intellectual" German to a High German standard. That sorrow would not, however, make it sensible to suggest that the attenuated forms of present-day Low German could be immediately serviceable for academic use. Mutatis mutandis, the same applies to the academicization of black languages in South Africa. Some of those languages might be immediate candidates for university-medium use, some only later, some never, and some headed for picturesque dialect status without political significance.
