Introduction

South Africa bears witness to a long and varied colonial and post-colonial history of contact between various language groups and, by almost inevitable consequence, also one of social conflict around matters of language and linguistic policy. This is particularly so in relation to Afrikaans (still known officially as Dutch until 1925), itself an example par excellence of a language that can trace its current and historical population of speakers as well as some of its most distinctive structural and lexical features to the consequences of linguistic contact between groups of highly divergent origins (Roberge 2002). The predominant focus in this paper, however, will remain limited to only a small part of this aforementioned history, namely the 17 or so years of the post-apartheid period up to the time of writing.

In terms of official language policy, the post-apartheid era signalled a radical departure from the strict bilingualism of the previous dispensation with the introduction of an 11-language policy which has seen nine African languages acquire official and nominal equal status alongside English and Afrikaans (Orman 2008:91). While this policy was heralded in some quarters as an innovative and progressive development in the domain of state language policy, it is generally acknowledged, at least by those familiar with the language-political situation in South Africa, that the policy in fact constituted a quite shrewd measure of conflict avoidance on the part of the ANC. As Heugh (2002a:460) notes, the policy was the result of an ‘eleventh-hour compromise’ designed to appease the concerns of Afrikaners that Afrikaans would be marginalised or even removed from public life in the new era as the language issue had become the major sticking point in the negotiations between the National Party and ANC which preceded the transition to democratic rule. A pragmatic retrospective interpretation of the policy necessarily leads one to the conclusion that rather than signalling any genuine and novel ideological commitment to the multilingual implications of the new constitution, the elevation to official status of nine African languages instead merely enabled the ANC to neutralise the previously privileged position of Afrikaans without Afrikaners being able to claim that their language had been downgraded, at least not in a de jure sense.