The politics of English in South Africa

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography grade: 20 Humboldt-University of Berlin (Department of English and American Studies) course: The Politics of English as a Global Language language: English abstract: Before one can start discussing the language policy of South Africa it is important to stress its diversity of language and culture groups. Around 25 languages are used in South Africa by more than 44.8 million people. That is the result of the influx of various groups of people to that region over the last centuries meaning not only the by the African themselves but also by people from Europe (Portuguese Dutch French Germans and British) and also from the East (Malaysia Indonesia and India). Nevertheless the majority of South Africans almost 80% of the population use an African language as their home language. The language situation in South Africa hasfor a long time been and still is quite difficult. Here the indigenous languages of the South African people met with the European languages of the colonists intermixed and coexisted with the many languages that were already spoken as mother tongues or as first languages. Like in many other former colonies the European languages had then been used by those who held political power and who considered the African languages as inferior. Both the European (English and Afrikaans) and the African languages were therefore distinguished into two varieties of prestige and referred to as H (high) or L (low) languages. [...] However until today the linguistic situation in South Africa is still quite difficult. Especially the use of English is a problematic one. Therefore this paper intends to give an overview of the politics of English in South Africa. Even though this paper wants to concentrate on the current status of English in South Africa it is necessary to make a digression into the language policy of the country fir