It’s Heritage Month with Heritage Day on 24 September, a day meant to recognise and celebrate the cultural wealth of South Africa.

The first thing that comes to most people’s minds when thinking of Heritage Day is colourful outfits representing the different cultures, but one key aspect of heritage, language and linguistic diversity, is forgotten. The UN warned in 2022 that two indigenous languages die every two weeks, which could lead to the death of 3 000 languages in this century. Language holds culture, a people’s history, heritage, rites of passage and other cultural information, which dies when the language dies. In South Africa, African languages have faced a decline with less and less representation in society, media, film and other cultural artefacts.

In Apartheid South Africa, Afrikaans was prioritised, funded and developed. English was the second most funded language, with government forms in English and Afrikaans, reflecting the settlement between the Boers (Afrikaaners) and English to divide South Africa among themselves at the exclusion of native South Africans and their languages. 

The apartheid government was intent on making Afrikaans the dominant language, so put laws in place to force everyone to speak the language and forced all schools to teach in Afrikaans. This is what led the children of Soweto in 1976 to rise up and protest against Afrikaans, culminating in police killing many young people, an event that is commemorated annually as Youth Day in South Africa. Sadly, to this day, many kids across South Africa still need to pass Afrikaans in order to pass the grade, an apartheid legacy that hasn’t been corrected in the past 30 years of democracy. 

Although there are language policies that seek to prioritise African languages in schools, these policies are not always applied and the government has not been monitoring applications, nor have they punished those who don’t adhere to the policies. The government itself has continued to print government forms in English and Afrikaans and conducts all its business in English, including speeches by the president and his ministers all the way to local government leadership in mayors. This ensures that English and Afrikaans have value, and the languages of the economy are English and Afrikaans. This excludes many African language speakers who are forced to study and speak English and Afrikaans in order to make a living. 

Even when Africans show their pride in their language and support African language radio stations, racism and deeply entrenched ideas of black inferiority where to be black is to be poor – as designed by Apartheid – see the audience as not having any economic value. Advertisers pay more money for adverts in English stations that have fewer numbers of listeners as they are seen to have more buying power than the millions who listen to African language stations who are seen to be too poor to afford most products that advertisers want to sell. Although the reality of South Africa is that the highest levels of poverty, hunger and unemployment are in the black community – another legacy of apartheid –  this does not mean that all black people are poor and unable to afford products. There are many township, rural and peri-urban based middle-class black South Africans. There are also many wealthy, suburban-living blacks who listen to African language radio stations as a way to connect to their roots, language and people. All these diverse groups of black people are ignored by the prevailing belief that ALL blacks are poor.  Ukhozi FM, a Zulu language radio station has the most radio listeners in South Africa at 7.5 million listeners, followed by Umhlobo Wenene, a Xhosa language station with 5,3 million. Advertisers would rather give money to Metro FM, the biggest English commercial station whose audience is almost half of the Ukhozi audience at 4.2 million.

Colonial mentalities that see the ability to speak English as a sign of intelligence, and the global cultural imperialism of English, have led to more English products being produced in South Africa than in any other language. When the Minister of Higher Education suggested that all Universities should introduce a language policy that would require all university graduates to study at least one African language in order to pass their degree, there was widespread outcry from the same people who are happy to invest an extra year studying German or Mandarin when they go to German or Chinese universities to study. 

However, there is hope on the horizon as the government has recently shared that its school mother tongue education pilot projects have been successful and will be rolled out across the country once sufficient funding has been raised. There are also many South Africans who have dedicated their lives to ensuring that African languages can once again take their place of pride in society. Academics are supporting students to write academic essays in their mother tongue, with various PhDs already produced in African languages across the SA academic landscape. That’s something to celebrate this Heritage Day as we also contemplate the challenges still facing indigenous languages in South Africa. 

Tell us: what does your language mean to you?