Eleven Official Languages? Count again Max...

Seen from above the eleven official languages situation in South Africa seems like a celebration of diversity, but seen from below the opposite is actually the case. Take for instance the Eastern Cape province and KwaZulu-Natal. If one would walk from Port Elizabeth to Durban, then you won't find that in one village people speak isiXhosa and then there is a sudden transition to people speaking isiZulu in the next village. The truth is that as you walk from village to village, you would find people speaking a number of different local dialects/languages that exist on a continuum between isiXhosa and isiZulu - and you would probably find that whilst people living at the start of your journey would have a little trouble understanding people living close to the end of your journey, people in neighbouring villages will have no such communication problems. So, rather than saying that people in one village speak isiXhosa/Zulu, it would be more accurate to say that people in one area speak Mpondo and in another area Cele and so forth...

Therefore, from the perspective of the rural areas, the eleven official languages are not a celebration of South African diversity - it is much more of a large-scale language reduction exercise by the South African state, that denies status to many local dialects and so effectively pushing local dialects towards standardization or extinction. A specific local dialect in the Eastern Cape for instance, that possesses a vocabulary and syntax that is somewhere between isiXhosa and isiZulu, would then have to "choose" with which standardized version to align itself - isiXhosa or isiZulu - thus contributing to its own extinction.

Now, if you put this type of spin on the whole debate about the importance of mother-tongue education in South Africa then you'll see that the participants in this debate are often guilty of oversimplification. Here is Max du Preez take on matters, as an example of the type of argument that is often made.

The catch-22 of mother-tongue education being: you need language standardization in order to have broad-based literacy/education. Or you need mastery of a language that would give you access to the world (in terms of communication, but also in terms of coming to grips with a modern world) - and probably English is better for this than Afrikaans, which is better for it than isiXhosa, which in turn is better than Cele or Mpondo or San, and so forth. But language is a tool like any other - if you are not a competent language user in a standardized high-culture language - some of the features of this tool remain unavailable to you. The question then becomes whether you would be better off using a less sophisticated tool, which you could hopefully wield more skillfully. Ai-ai...