Abstract

After 30 years of seemingly immutable, top-down language policy in education in South Africa, the early 1990’s and the dismantling of apartheid have brought considerable momentum into the language discussion. Since the first democratic and general elections in 1994, this has led to radically new suggestions and policy formulations for the ca. 40 million inhabitants of this multilingual country. The new Constitution of South Africa (Act No 200 of 1993) has given official status, formerly granted to English and Afrikaans only, to the 11 major languages (estimates of percentages of L1 speakers of the population given in brackets, cf. Webb ed. 1995: p. 16): isiZulu (22%), isiXhosa (17%), Afrikaans (15%), Sepedi (10%), English (9%), Setswana (8%), Sesotho (7%), Xitsonga (4%), siSwati (3%), Tshivenda (2%), and isiNdebele (1.5%). Concerning the language-in-education policy, the new developments have sparked off wide-spread interest, responses and involvement in South Africa, not only with the small group of expert policy makers, but also with a wide range of socio-linguistic, educational, and political interest groups. In accordance with the present government’s credo of grassroots’ involvement and consultancy, all of these interested parties have been asked for their input to the central governmental documents on language policy in education for the future

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