Kamwangamalu

This page is for discussing Nkonko Kamwangamalu's "The language policy / language economics interface and mother-tongue education in post-apartheid South Africa".

Kam: Until the native languages of South Africa (Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Swati, Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Tsonga, Venda) are treated as equal to Afrikaans and English there can be no equality.

A question:

It is doubtful that everyone working in Johannesburg can be expected to master 11 languages; doesn't it make a certain amount of sense that one should become the standard? Also, this might be unpopular, but it seems like elevating one of the native languages will send a message that the ethnic groups using that language are being given preferential treatment. Is it not fitting that a foreign language should be made the standard, so as to avoid tensions between the various ethnicities of South Africa?

I don't think this is the same as considering languages superior or inferior to other languages, it just seems practical to realize that in a multicultural environment like South Africa not everyone is going to grow up speaking the same language you did.

The word "essentialist" is dropped a few times in this paper. Wasn't sure what it meant, so looked it up and: essentialism is the belief or doctrine that any entity has a specific set of characteristics, and thus anything can be described/defined. This is apparently not a popular view.

Ex nihilo: "out of nothing". It strikes me that probably a lot of people know this. I didn't.

Wow I never thought about it but maybe issues with languages and (perhaps thereby) cultures getting weeded out and disappearing is truly an economic issue above all, because as we establish and rely on a "global economy" more and more, we need that baseline communication tool that works across boarders. It seems to me that the trends for big industry and large source--dispersal methods for goods to any public are bound to flush out culture because unless a people can hold onto or generate a self-sufficient way of life that does not require assistance from (or get in the way of) a political power connected to the global economy, they will inevitably have to assimilate at least to some degree to global standards (including language standards).

Keeps bringing me back to the same idea over and over again. Local. Think local. Might not seem relevant to you here but it is, it usually is.

As I was reading this I started to think about the lecture Rick gave us on ebonics. It is harder for people to learn if they are being taught in a different language or dialect from what they speak at home but at some point there needs to be a line drawn. There comes a time when we can't teach in more than one language and you need to pick one.