#lunguistics

Allowing students to speak, learn and thrive in their mother tongue is something that every school or university should strive for. This discussion has been a long and often loud and problematic one. One of the aspects of the discussion is whether the University of Stellenbosch should keep Afrikaans as a medium of instruction or if Afrikaans should be removed and whether English or an African language should replace or join the mode of teaching. Many claim that African languages will not in the foreseeable future become academic languages.

I fully believe in the advancement of the African languages the way I do about advancing anyone’s home language regardless of what this language is. However, no advancement of one language should come to the total detriment of another. Afrikaans has support and many individuals in south Africa speak it and are taught in it from primary school onwards. Removing Afrikaans from the languages of tuition at Stellenbosch would greatly disadvantage all the mother tongue Afrikaans speakers, not just white Afrikaners but also the second large pool of individuals speaking the language, the coloured community.

To me the second part to the argument is, that the change of languages in universities should be a gradual one. Adding languages and using interpreters as the University is doing at present is a very valid option as it allows the lecture to proceed in the current global lingua franca international language of English which is at least understood a little by most individuals whether they are international students or South Africans. The interpreters then translate the lecture, as it is presented, to Afrikaans and possibly in the future to other languages. This would enable everyone to thrive in their languages and grow the vocabulary available to them.

The main issue with introducing African languages as a medium of instruction at university level, at least at the present moment, is that they need to be developed from the primary school level upwards to enable the language capacity of those learning in it to grow and be able to deal with the demand of academic writing and cognition at university level. While this is happening the need for translators and individuals translating text books and resources is great. As well as people to develop specific vocabulary that presently simply does not exist. Therefore, those languages should be supported to allow them to develop not only a set of text books but also a set of canonical literatures that can be used for the literature portion of the language study.