The language policy / language economics interface and mother-tongue education in post-apartheid South Africa

Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu
Howard University

This article examines the issue of mother-tongue education in South Africa against the background of the interface between the countrys language policy and language economics, a eld of study whose focus is on the theoretical and empirical analysis of the ways in which linguistic and economic variables inuence one another. The article argues that because education plays such an important role in employment and in gaining access to political power, mother tongue education or its denial is as important as any other aspects, political and economic planning among them, with which South African policy-makers appear to be mostly concerned. The article draws attention to two key issues in language economics, namely (i) the relevance of language as a dening element of economic processes such as production, distribution and consumption; and (ii) the relevance of language as an element, in the acquisition of which individual actors may have a good reason to invest. It warns that unless these issues are taken into account in policy (re)formulation, mother tongue education will never break through. In conclusion, the paper considers the implications of policy failure vis--vis mother tongue education, with a focus on current language shift towards English especially in urban African communities.

The problem
In 1994 South Africa liberated itself from apartheid and adopted a multilingual language policy giving ocial recognition to eleven languages: English and Afrikaans, previously the only two ocial languages of the state, and nine African languages, namely Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Swati, Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Tsonga and Venda. One of the main goals of the new language policy has been

Language Problems & Language Planning 28:2 (2004), 131146. issn 02722690 / e-issn 15699889 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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to promote the status of African languages by using them in the higher domains such as education, the media, and government administration. Research reports on language use in these and other areas suggest that the policy has not achieved its objectives (e.g., Hibbert 1998; Kamwangamalu 2000, 2001; Reagan 2001). On the contrary, English and Afrikaans remain central to the administration of the state and its institutions, including education, much as they were in the apartheid era. If anything has changed at all in the use of these two languages in the higher domains, it is that English has now become far more powerful than Afrikaans and has assumed an unassailable position to the extent that none of its co-ocial languages can match it. As the Minister of Education, Professor Kader Asmal, puts it, the new language policy is not working for all ocial languages; the tides seem to be turning increasingly in favor of English (Daily News, 8 May 2001). This state of aairs raises a number of questions: How does one promote multilingualism in education, for instance, if African languages are conned only to the rst four years of primary education rather than used as media of instruction throughout the entire educational system? How does one promote African languages as media of instruction in the entire educational system against the stigma of inferior languages which was attributed to them in the apartheid era as a result of the legacy of Bantu Education (to which I shall return shortly)? How does one prevent the emergence of a society in which, as Peirce (1992) warns, power is concentrated in a minority of the countrys population who have had access to English-medium education? It seems that the prevalent use of English and Afrikaans in the higher domains such as education is sustained mostly by the socioeconomic value with which these two languages are associated in the South African linguistic market place and, in the case of English, beyond it. In this paper I discuss the link between language and the economy, for this has hardly been acknowledged nor seriously considered in eorts to implement the new language policy. I argue that if African languages are to be accepted, even by their own speakers, as a viable medium of instruction throughout the entire educational system, they must be given the buying power that English and Afrikaans have in the South African linguistic market place. Put dierently, the key argument of the paper is that for the new language policy to achieve its intended goal to promote African languages, these languages must become what may be termed social and economic mobilisers (Xiao 1998), that is, they must be vested with at least some of the material privileges and perquisites that are currently shared by only English and Afrikaans. Like these two languages, the African languages must become the languages of access to resources and employment, of political

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participation, and of upward social mobility (Webb 1995). Unless the new language policy is revised and geared towards these targets, eorts to promote the indigenous languages will be doomed to failure, despite the countrys constitutional commitment to multilingualism. Research into the economics of language planning (e.g., Ager 2001; Cooper 1989; Bourdieu 1991; Coulmas 1992; Grin 1994, 1996a, 1996b, 2001) suggests that there is a need to rethink the new language policy with a view to adopting a more pragmatic, decentralised and market-oriented approach to language planning. The article will be organised as follows. The next section concentrates on the perennial debate around the issue of the medium of instruction. It attempts to contextualise what some have negatively characterised as the myth of the mother tongue (Ferguson 1992; Winkler 1997) against the background of South Africas past language policies, especially the Bantu Education Act of 1953. This is intended to explain why the concept of mother tongue, or mother tongue education for that matter, is central to the on-going debate around South Africas new language-in-education policy; and to provide the background against which current negative attitudes towards the use of African languages as media of learning and teaching can be understood better. The subsequent section addresses the link between language and the economy. It suggests that such a link is vital if the new language policy is to achieve its objective to promote African languages as media of learning and teaching. The last section considers the implications of language policy failure for the indigenous African languages, with a focus on current language shift from majority African languages such as Zulu to English especially in urban black communities. I argue that the shift to English is a by-product of language policy failure on the one hand, and is deeply embedded in the economic power of English vis-vis the indigenous African languages on the other.

Mother tongue education and Bantu Education Act

The debate around the issue of the medium of instruction, or, in South-Africaspeak, the language of learning and teaching, has been going on since the country liberated itself from apartheid in 1994. On the one hand, the renewed interest in mother tongue education appears to derive from the nding, documented in several studies around the world, that pupils perform better at school when they are taught through the medium of their mother tongue rather than through the medium of a foreign language (e.g., Akinnaso 1991; Webb 2002;

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Auerbach 1993). On the other hand, such renewed interest in the question of mother tongue education, observes Kamanda (2002), is informed by UNESCOs model of mother tongue literacy (UNESCO 1953), reviewed recently by Tabouret-Keller and others (1997). UNESCO ([1953] 1995) denes mother tongue education as education which uses as its medium of instruction a persons mother tongue, that is, the language which a person has acquired in early years and which normally has become his natural instrument of thought and communication. The concept of mother tongue has been controversial. As Ricento observes (2002: 12), it is not always easy to determine a persons mother tongue, particularly in multilingual societies, in which children are raised to speak a language that is not the native language of either parent or of their speech communities, or in which children grow up being exposed to several languages within the family or the wider community. Winkler (1997) also questions the usefulness of the concept of mother tongue in multilingual urban settings. In her study aimed to determine the mother tongue of students at Maryvale College in Johannesburg, Winkler shows that the majority of students at the College grow up in a multilingual home without a language that could clearly be identied as mother tongue. Similarly, Ferguson remarks that much of the worlds verbal communication takes place by means of languages that are not the users mother tongue, but their second, third, or nth language, acquired one way or another and used when appropriate (1992: xiii). This point can be illustrated with the following extract from Mesthries interview with a twentythree-year-old student from Germiston (Johannesburg) about the languages in which he is procient:
My fathers home language was Swazi, and my mothers home language was Tswana. But as I grew up in a Zulu-speaking area we used mainly Zulu and Swazi at home. But from my mothers side I also learnt Tswana well. In my high school I came into contact with lots of Sotho and Tswana students, so I can speak these two languages well. (Quoted in Mesthrie 1995: xvi)

It is not clear what the mother tongue of the twenty-three-old student from Germiston could be. Against this background, Ferguson suggests (1992:xiii) that the whole mystique of mother tongue should be dropped from the linguists set of professional myths about language. Canagarajah (2002:107) concurs, arguing that constructs such as mother tongue should be abandoned, for they are misleading essentialist, static and unitary. Pennycook (2002) expresses similar concerns about the usefulness of constructs such as mother tongue.

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However, unlike Ferguson, Canagarajah, and others (e.g., Braine 1998; Singh 1998), Pennycook argues that we should understand such a construct as a strategically essentialist argument, one that, as Canagarajah puts it, has its uses in the exercise of power (2002: 108). Against this background, I argue that to appreciate the construct of mother tongue, one must understand (and this is a very important point) the social history and socio-political context in which it is embedded. Likewise, as Cooper remarks, language planning cannot be understood apart from its social context or apart from the history which produced that context (1989: 182). This is what Harold Schiman (1996: 5) has termed a politys linguistic culture, that is, the set of behaviours, assumptions, cultural forms, prejudices, folk belief systems, attitudes, stereotypes, ways of thinking about language, and religio-historical circumstances associated with a particular language. Put dierently, as Schiman notes (1996: 22), language policies do not evolve ex nihilo; they are not taken o a shelf, dusted o, and plugged into a particular polity; rather, they are cultural constructs, and are rooted in and evolve from historical elements of many kinds, some explicit and overt, some implicit and covert. In the context of the old South Africa, the whole machinery of the apartheid regime operated mostly on the basis of deliberate, politically motivated promotion of mother tongue, especially in education. The campaign for mother tongue education was driven by the church and by the apartheid governments philosophy of Christian Nationalism. Christian Nationalism propagated notions of the separate identity and development of each volk (people) and of the God-given responsibility of the Afrikaner volk to spread the gospel to the native inhabitants of Africa and to act as their guardians (Shingler 1973). Engelbrecht observes that the basic values of this philosophy among them the promotion of a Christian philosophy of life with the emphasis on Calvinistic beliefs, support for the principle of nationalism (a national ideal, traditions, religion and cultures), mother tongue instruction and parental involvement in education reinforced the doctrine of separate provision of education for groups of people with dierent languages, religion and cultures (Engelbrecht 1992: 499). In support of this philosophy and especially the notion of mother tongue education, the church preached that God had willed it that there [should] be separate nations each with its own language and that, therefore, mother tongue education was the will of God (Malherbe 1977: 101). With the churchs backing, the apartheid regime saw to it that every ethnic group was educated in their own mother tongue. So, language became a yardstick for segregated education: isiZulu mother-tongue speakers had to be educated in

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isiZulu-medium schools, isiXhosa mother-tongue speakers had to be educated in isiXhosa-medium schools, the Whites of British descent had to be schooled in English-medium schools, and their Dutch-descended counterparts had to be schooled in Afrikaans-medium schools. What distinguished mother-tongue education for the Whites from mother tongue education for the Blacks was that the former was an education with a dierence: it was intended to promote white interests, to ensure that the white segment of South Africas population had access not only to the languages of power, English and Afrikaans, but also to the privileges with which these languages were associated. To achieve these objectives, in 1953 the apartheid government introduced legislation known as the Bantu Education Act. Briey, at the heart of this policy was, among other things, (a) the dire determination by the apartheid regime to reduce the inuence of English in black schools; (b) the imposition in these schools of the use of both Afrikaans and English on an equal basis as media of instruction; and (c) the extension of mother-tongue education from grade 4 to grade 8 purposely to promote the philosophy of Christian Nationalism as described previously. The black pupils resisted this policy. They saw education in their own mother tongue as a dead end, a barrier to more advanced learning and a lure to self-destruction. Also, they saw such an education as a trap designed by the apartheid government to ensure that the black pupils did not acquire sucient command of the high-status languages (English and Afrikaans) for it would enable them to compete with their white counterparts for well-paying jobs and prestigious career options (Alexander 1997: 84). It seems that under apartheid mother-tongue education was intended, as Smith (1987, cited in Pennycook [2002]: 16) would put it, to serve the requirements of those who provided it rather than those for whom it was provided, that is the black pupils. The black pupils resistance to the Bantu Education Act and the apartheid regimes determination to impose it led to the bloody Soweto uprisings of 16 June 1976. These uprisings resulted in two particularly undesired outcomes: they boosted the status of an already powerful language, English, over both Afrikaans and African languages in black schools and in black communities at large, and they led the African people to equate education in their own languages with inferior education. Since those ill-fated events of June 1976 mother-tongue education in African languages became stigmatised in South Africa and (this is a very important point) that stigma lingers on to this day.

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So the demand for English-medium education, and not for mother tongue education in an African language has to be understood against the background of the socio-economic power and international status of English on the one hand and of the legacy of the policy of Bantu education on the other. Also, in post-apartheid South Africa there is no sustained demand for multilingual skills for sociocultural, academic and administrative purposes. Consequently, as Verhoef (1998) remarks, for African pupils there is no alternative to English-medium education. The demand for English-medium education is exacerbated by the fact that black pupils are only too well aware of the social, economic and political power of English to ask for education in any other language, and by the fact that their own languages have no economic cachet either locally or internationally. As a background to the discussion that follows, I would like to return to the questions I raised earlier: How does one promote multilingualism in education if African languages are not used as media of instruction throughout the entire educational system? How does one promote African languages as media of instruction against the stigma left by the Bantu Education Act? If the new language policy is not working for all ocial languages, and if the tides seem to be turning increasingly in favor of English (e.g., Daily News, 8 May 2001), how does one prevent the emergence of a society in which, as Peirce warns (1992: 6), power is concentrated in a minority of speakers of English? In the section that follows I argue that if the new language policy is to achieve its primary goal to promote the use of the indigenous African languages in the educational system, policy makers need to seriously consider the link, thus far neglected or deliberately overlooked, between language and the economy and approach the issue of mother-tongue education in African languages as a marketing problem.

Mother-tongue education as language marketing

The discussion in this section draws on the theories of the economics of language, also known as language economics, to make the case for the promotion of African languages especially in education. Language economics, as a eld of research, mainly focuses on the theoretical and empirical analysis of the ways in which linguistic and economic variables inuence one another (Grin 2001: 68). Some of the issues raised in language economics that are relevant to this paper include the following:

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i.

the relevance of language as a dening element of economic processes such as production, distribution and consumption; ii. the relevance of language as an element, in the acquisition of which individual actors may have a good reason to invest; iii. language teaching as a social investment, yielding net benets (marketrelated or not); iv. the economic implications (costs and benets) of language policies, whether these costs and benets are market-related or not. (Grin 2001: 66) Within the framework of language economics, linguistic products such as language, language varieties, utterances, and accents are seen as goods or commodities to which the market assigns a value (Bourdieu 1991, Coulmas 1992). The term market refers to the social context in which linguistic products are used. On a given linguistic market, some products are valued more highly than others. The market value of a linguistic product such as the mother tongue is determined in relation to other languages in the planetary economy (Coulmas 1992: 7785). It is, as Gideon Strauss (1996: 9) notes, an index of the functional appreciation of the language by the relevant community. Against this background, I would like to argue that for the mother tongue to succeed in education, that is, for it to function alongside English and Afrikaans as a valuable medium of education, the issue must be treated as a marketing problem. Essentially, says Dominguez (1998: 4, after Torres and Cordoba), all marketing action consists of placing the most ideal product (product policy) in the adequate place and moment (distribution policy), at the convenient price (price policy) causing consumer demand with the most ecacious means (promotion policy). Along these lines, as Cooper (1989: 72) would put it, viewing mothertongue education as a marketing problem entails developing the right product backed by the right promotion and put in the right place at the right price. Concerning the product, Cooper says that language planners must recognise, identify, or design products which the potential consumer will nd attractive. These products are to be dened and audiences targeted on the basis of (empirically determined) consumer needs. Dominguez concurs, noting that the product is the solution of a problem or what meets a conscious or unconscious need (1998:1). Promotion of a communicative innovation such as language refers to eorts to induce potential users to adopt it, whether adoption is viewed as awareness, positive evaluation, prociency, or usage (Cooper 1989:74). Put dierently,

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promotion deals with communicating the benets that a product or service carries and persuading the market to buy it (Dominguez 1998: 7). For instance, the fact that access/promotion to certain jobs requires a language qualication, says Dominguez, has a very visible economic component. Place refers to the provision of adequate channels of distribution and response. That is, a person motivated to buy a product must know where to nd it (Cooper 1989: 78). And the price of a consumer product is viewed as the key to determining the products appeals to the consumers (Cooper 1989: 79). Drawing on the foregoing discussion, it seems that in the South African context the product, that is the African languages, and the place where these languages are spoken can easily be identied. One knows, for instance, that Zulu is the demographically dominant language in the province of KwaZuluNatal; whereas Xhosa has this status in the Eastern Cape. Therefore, the issue of marketing mother-tongue education hinges not so much on the product or the place, but rather on the promotion and price of the product (i.e., indigenous languages) in the linguistic market place. It is worth recalling that linguistic products are also goods to which the market assigns a value, and that on a given linguistic market, some products are valued more highly than others (Bourdieu 1991: 18). In this regard, African communities nd English in particular more appealing than the indigenous languages because of the economic value with which English is associated in the linguistic market place. Yet the link between language and economy, as far as African languages are concerned, has hardly been taken into consideration in language policy decisions. For the mother tongue to also become appealing, it must be assigned an economic value in the linguistic market place. This entails meeting three conditions. First, there is the need to vest the mother tongue with some of the privileges, prestige, power and material gains that have been for so long associated with English and Afrikaans. Second, the use of the mother tongue should be extended to the higher domains such as education, economy and the government and administration which, as if apartheid never died, remain under the monopoly of English and Afrikaans. Third, a certied (i.e., school-acquired) knowledge of the mother tongue should become one of the criteria for access to employment in the private as well as the public sector. Meeting these three conditions does not necessarily mean removing English and Afrikaans from, or diminishing their status in, the higher domains such as education. It simply means creating conditions under which the mother tongue can compete with English and Afrikaans in at least the South African linguistic market place. After all, for the language consumer the most central question is

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not so much whether or not the mother tongue should be used as a medium of learning. Rather, the consumer is interested in the outcome of an education in an indigenous language and how this would compare materially with the outcome of an education in English or Afrikaans. For instance, would an education through the medium of an indigenous African language ensure the language consumer socio-economic self-advancement? Would that education enhance the language consumers standard of living? Would it give the language consumer a competitive edge in the employment market? Or, put dierently, what benets would individuals actually reap, particularly on the labor market, because of their skills in the mother tongue? And how would these benets compare to the benets deriving from the skills in a language such as English or Afrikaans? (Grin 1995:227231). As I have observed elsewhere (Kamwangamalu 1997:245), it does not take long for the language consumer to realise, rst, that education in an African language does not ensure one social mobility and better socioeconomic life; second, that those who can aord it, and among them policy-makers themselves, send their children to schools where the medium of instruction is English; and, third, that when all is told, only education in English opens doors to the outside world as well as to high-paying jobs that an education in the medium of an African language does not open at the moment.

Conclusion
This paper has attempted to make the case for mother-tongue education in South Africa, with a focus on the indigenous African languages. This it has done against the background of the countrys past language policies, especially the Bantu Education Act. The success of mother-tongue education will depend on many variables including the availability of human and nancial resources, the political will, and peoples attitudes which, in turn, are dependent on the payo of mother-tongue education. But as Tollefson (1991) observes pointedly, only when the language achieves a full range of functions and no stigma is attached to its use has it arrived. For African languages to arrive, black South Africans, whose languages have been marginalised for centuries, need to know what an education in their own languages would do for them in terms of upward social mobility. Would it, for instance be as rewarding as, say, Englishor Afrikaans-medium education? Black South Africans would not support or strive to have an education through the medium of an African language, even if such an education were made available as a result of the new language policy,

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unless it was given a real cachet in the broader political and economic context. Alternatively, the demand for education in the medium of English will continue to grow, especially as humans like to put butter on both sides of their bread and if possible a little jam as well (DSouza 1996: 259). As the demand for English increases, the few African mothers who have knowledge of this much sought-after commodity (i.e., English) will, as Kwesiga puts it, start teaching their children English before they are born (1994: 58). This is because languages, as Fishman, Cooper, and Conrad say (1977: 115), are rarely acquired for their own sake. They are acquired as keys to other things that are desired in life. As I have observed elsewhere (e.g., Kamwangamalu 2003: 236), in the context of South Africa these other things include the desire to have access to employment, which now generally requires knowledge of English; and the desire to move up the social ladder and identify with the power elite (St. Clair 1982: 173), whose language practices involve extensive use of English, the current language of rule, power and prestige, a language with no sell-by date attached to it (Pakir 1998) and one in which, as Lynn (1995) puts it, the elite reproduces itself. It is not surprising that for most black people in South Africa English has become the sole open sesame by means of they and their children in particular can achieve unlimited vertical social mobility (Lynn, 1995:55). As for the African languages, they are shunned by their own speakers because they carry the status of inferior language, a stigma with which they were associated in the apartheid era as a result of the Bantu education Act. Because of this stigma, and because African languages have no cachet in the economic context, there has resulted what Crowley (1996) has termed pragmatic language shift to English especially among the younger generations of black South Africans in urban communities. As much as one would like to agree with the view, expressed by Laurence Wright, that no part of South Africa is, in principle, going to permit its children to be divorced from their home language and culture (2002: 173), the reality is that the contrary is already happening, as documented by de Klerk (2000), Bowerman (2000) and Kamwangamalu (2003) for language shift in urban centers in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, respectively. These studies show that black parents consciously forbid their children to speak an African language in favor of English in the home, a domain that Fasold (1984) describes as the last bastion of a subordinate language, in this case an African language, in competition with a dominant language of wider currency, English. It is, therefore, of essence that policy makers acknowledge the link between language and the economy. After all, as Sue Wright remarks pointedly (1994: 3), a recognition of the very richness of

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language as a social phenomenon lies at the heart of the economics of language. Unless the status of African languages is improved along the lines suggested in this article, language shift to English will accelerate and will be unstoppable. Whether policy-makers will heed this warning remains to be seen.

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Mu cikoso Cididi ca mwakulu ne ca bubanji ne malu a kulongesha mu miakulu ya bankambwa kunyima kwa apatede mu Afrike wa kwinshi
Mu dibeji edi ndi ngakula bwalu bwa kulongesha mu miakulu ya bankambwa mu Afrike wa kwinshi. Bamfumu ba Afrike wa kwinshi badi bapita kutuma ntema yabo yonso ku malu a bubanji bwa ditunga ne badi balengulula malu adi atangila miakulu ya bankambwa. Diyi

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dinene dindi ngamba mu dibeji edi didi ne, nansha bamfumu ba ditunga bikala bakula malu a cididi ne a bubanji bwa ditunga, ki mbimpe bwa bobo kulengulula malu adi atangila miakulu ya bakambwa bwalu miakulu eyi idi ne mushinga mukole mu nsombelu yetu. Nanku bidi bikengela ne miakulu eyi bayilongesha bana mu tulasa. Kadi bwa baledi kwitaba ne bana babo balonga mu miakulu ya bankambwa, bidi bikengela ne bamanya cidi bana bapeta kunyima kwa dilonga mu miakulu eyi. Cianana bantu ne bela miakulu ya bankambwa nyima. Ku ndekelu kwa dibeji ndi ngakula bwa bubi budi mwa kulwila miakulu ya bankambwa padi aba badi bayakula bayilengulula. Ne mpita kushindika meji anyi pa malu a dishintulula dia mwakulu adi enzeka nangananga mu bimenga mudi bana betu baka basombela, bwalu bidi bimweka ne mu bimenga emu baka bakadi balekela miakulu ya bankambwa bwa kwakula amu angele.

Resumo La lingvopolitika-lingvoekonomika interfrontigo kaj patrinlingva edukado en Sudafriko post Rasapartigo

Tiu ci artikolo ekzamenas la demandon pri patrinlingva edukado en Sudafriko antau la fono de la interfrontigo inter la lingvopolitiko de la lando kaj lingvoekonomiko, tiu studkampo, kiu fokusigas je teoria kaj empiria analizo de la manieroj, lau kiuj lingvaj kaj ekonomiaj variantoj inuas inter si. La artikolo argumentas, ke, pro tio, ke edukado ludas tiel gravan rolon en dungigo kaj en kapto de aliro al politika povo, patrinlingva edukado au gia rifuzigo egale gravas kiel aliaj aspektoj (inter ili politika kaj ekonomia planado), kiuj sajne plej multe koncernas sudafrikajn politikofarantojn. La artikolo atentigas pri du slosilaj demandoj de lingvoekonomiko, nome (i) la graveco de la lingvo kiel dina elemento en ekonomiaj procedoj, kiel ekzemple produktado, distribuado kaj konsumado; kaj (ii) la graveco de la lingvo kiel elemento, en kies akirado la individuaj agantoj havas bonan kialon por investi. Gi avertas, ke, krom se oni prenos en konsideron tiujn demandojn en (re)formulado de politikoj, patrinlingva edukado neniam trabatos. Konklude, la referajo ^ konsideras la implicojn de politika malsukceso rilate al patrinlingva edukado, fokuse je la aktuala lingvosovigo lau la direkto de la angla, precipe en urbaj komunumoj afrikaj.

Authors address
Howard University Department of English 248 Locke Hall 2441 6th Street, N. W. Washington, D. C. 20059, USA nkamwangamalu@howard.edu

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About the author

Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu, associate professor of English and linguistics at Howard University, has taught linguistics at the National University of Singapore, the University of Swaziland, and the University of Natal, where he was professor and director of the Linguistics Program. His research interests include multilingualism, code-switching, language policy and planning, language and identity, New Englishes, and African linguistics. He has published widely in these areas, is the author of a recent monograph The Language Planning Situation in South Africa (2001), and has guest-edited special issues on this and related topics for The International Journal of the Sociology of Language (2000), Multilingua (1998), and World Englishes (2002).