This book is the first to offer an interdisciplinary and comprehensive reference work on the often-marginalised languages of southern Africa. The authors analyse a range of different concepts and questions, including language and sociality, social and political history, multilingual government, and educational policies. In doing so, they present significant original research, ensuring that the work will remain a key reference point for the subject. This ambitious and wide-ranging edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of southern African languages, sociolinguistics, history and politics.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,0, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Department of English and American Studies), course: The Politics of English as a Global Language, 19 entries in the bibliography, 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 la

The politics of language in South Africa is a selected collection of essays that contains the proceedings of a colloquium organised by Vic Webb, the guest editor.

A wide-ranging guide to language and society in South Africa. The book surveys the most important language groupings in the region in terms of wider socio-historical processes; contact between the different language varieties; language and public policy issues associated with post-apartheid society and its eleven official languages.

The preamble to the post-apartheid South African constitution states that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity’ and promises to ‘lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law’ and to ‘improve the quality of life of all citizens’. This would seem to commit the South African government to, amongst other things, the implementation of policies aimed at fostering a common sense of South African national identity, at societal dev- opment and at reducing of levels of social inequality. However, in the period of more than a decade that has now elapsed since the end of apartheid, there has been widespread discontent with regard to the degree of progress made in connection with the realisation of these constitutional aspirations. The ‘limits to liberation’ in the post-apartheid era has been a theme of much recent research in the ?elds of sociology and political theory (e. g. Luckham, 1998; Robins, 2005a). Linguists have also paid considerable attention to the South African situation with the realisation that many of the factors that have prevented, and are continuing to prevent, effective progress towards the achievement of these constitutional goals are linguistic in their origin.

Almost three-quarters of South Africans in the late-1990s call themselves Christians. From colonial times, when missionaries embroiled themselves in frontier conflicts, until recently, when both defenders and opponents of apartheid draw heavily upon Christian doctrine and ritual, Christian impulses have shaped South Africa.