Not to skewer the post-census numbers euphoria, but we have to face our linguistic selves in the morning mirror. The language landscape in South Africa is not pretty, in two very troubling ways: (a) we have virtually no idea who speaks what — this information has simply never been gathered; and (b) to a large extent, policymakers around the country are quite clearly not interested in who speaks what, in which case emerging policy based on census-type figures is potentially ill-begotten.
The Census 2001 has spoken (sort of): nearly 24% of South Africa speaks Zulu as a home language, with English at just over 8%. But are these figures helpful or reliable in any way? Other than the dimmest, most tantalising peek through the dark language glass, no, these figures are utterly unrevealing.
The mirror’s refraction is so great as to render the numbers almost useless, because the census asked just this single language question: what is the language you most frequently use at home? This works just nicely in the most rural Transkei where you might find only isiXhosa esisulungekileyo,/i> (pure Xhosa), and in the most suburban upper Claremont English Cape Town home, and certainly in the neo-retro suiwer Afrikaans tuisland of Orania. But these are exceptional scenarios, not the norm.
The much-vaunted South African multilingualism is far more fluid and extraordinary than these figures reveal. Specifically, the most heterogeneous chunk of the country, with the widest lingustic repertoire, is Gauteng, where nearly nine million people speak … just about everything.
Because the census asks just this one question, the answer to which is unclear for any of the several million multilingual township residents in Soweto, Sebokeng, Alexandra, and so on, the data that emerges is “flat”: South Africa appears to be neatly chopped up into 11 zones of monolingual speakers. The truth is radically removed from this. First, there are documentable, important subvarieties of several national languages: there are children (importantly, for the purposes of language transmission) speaking Mpondo, Bhaca, Cele and smaller Nguni languages, who are forced to declare themselves arbitrarily as “Xhosa” or “Zulu”, even where these “dialects” are mutually unintelligible with the standard language.
Second, there are millions of households that are multilingual in English and Afrikaans, or in some combination of Zulu/Xhosa/Sotho/Tsonga/everything else, for whom it is a non-trivial matter to decide whether they feel they speak more Zulu or more Tsonga, more English or more Afrikaans, at home.
When asked by a form-wielding official, guess what? People usually answer with the name of a prestige language, such as Zulu or English.
Third, there are likely several million speakers whose repertoire includes different versions of the same language (rural Zulu versus Johannesburg Zulu), or general black English versus Model C English as either first or second language, massively raising the national English distribution to 40% or 60%? Wish we knew.
Fourth, large chunks of urban black speech communities command one or more parts of the messily fluid language continuum that could be called “township Zulu” or “Zulu/Sotho” or Tsotsitaal or Isicamtho. What are these speakers supposed to answer?
The census must beef up the tiny part of its budget that must deal with language information. What is currently hidden is the degree of English dispersion among South Africans (largely as a second language), and the distribution of all other second language varieties. Who is winning the lingua franca “war” — English or Afrikaans?
The second trouble is on the order of an already identified but unaddressed national crisis: we revel in very infant-like symbolic multilingualism (“hello!” to everyone at a conference, or the odd gurgle from Parliament, in all 11 languages). And yet we have little understanding of the processes of language acquisition or shift in the country.
Instead, the national language watchdog and adviser to the departments of arts and culture, the Pan South African language board (Pansalb), struggles on with a tricky mandate, and patchy data, making annual symbolic gestures on Heritage Day at the triumphant national right to be multilingual.
We have absolutely no idea what to do about the multilingualism that pervades the urban centres of the country; rather, we focus on the breaches of “our language rights!”, well, actually most often “ons taalregte“.
Meanwhile, linguistic Rome burns: the fundamental message that multilingualism in a single house, nay, in a single family, is quite healthy for the rapid cognitive development of a child, is lost. And, typically, this healthy, if messy, multilingualism is of a fairly ill-defined urban code-mixed nature. But we can reach no judgement on this, because we have no data. Linguists (startlingly few sit on Pansalb, or are in any structural position to advise the department) are continuing to fail to get across this basic message: multilingualism is an incredible resource, if also an incredible kopseer which certainly will not recede by legislating everything 11 times over.
This headache must be faced head-on, and be drawn into legislative and educational practice. And black parents who suppress Zulu, or whichever African language (so that little Siphiwe will learn “perfect” English), must be gently enlightened and strongly opposed in the education policy forum.
This does not mean that the home language of your choice — English, in the case of Robert Kirby’s flappy panic (“Low-pressure academic meditations”, May 16, ) — will tumble into unregulated chaos. But Kirby has a point: there is a real role for (prescriptive) language standardisation. And without data on who speaks what, we are in no position to legislate standard languages.
What is called for, in the case of the census, is revolutionary data collection techniques (audio, video), and far more serious attention to language. If we go to the billion-rand trouble of locating all these census interviewees, we may as well actually check what they speak! The better to know our multilingual selves and to plan for our shared language future.
Dr Simon Donnelly lectures linguistics at Wits University.