Linguistic struggles within and beyond the Southern African Development Community

Abstract

This paper argues that the linguistic struggles faced by the Southern African Development Community (the SADC) represent common linguistic struggles found in Africa and the world where some languages are accused of dominating, stifling and suppressing others. However, the language situation within the SADC is interesting because it offers us a rare opportunity in which we can observe two types or stages of a linguistic struggle at the same time; the first one involves a clash between European languages (English, French and Portuguese) that the SADC recognizes as its working languages and the second one involves a struggle between these European languages and the African languages spoken in the SADC region. But when all is said and done, linguistic struggles of this nature demonstrate to us that from a socio-political point of view, as opposed to a linguistic point of view, languages are not equal and they do not exist in a vacuum. Once placed next to each other, certain characteristics of each language (and its speakers) such as their economic, political or mobility power begin to emerge. The paper, therefore, sees the linguistic struggles within the SADC (the organization) and its region as all-encompassing and therefore in need of broad-based solutions that go beyond the SADC and Africa.