Language should not decide who belongs in South Africa - IOL

Every September, South Africa commemorates Heritage Month with Heritage Day observed on 24 September. We celebrate our food, music, clothing, histories and, increasingly, our rich linguistic diversity. As we celebrate this year, we need to ask an uncomfortable question: what happens when language becomes a test of who belongs? The recent wave of xenophobic sentiment and anti-immigrant mobilisation has exposed a contradiction at the heart of South African society. We live in a multilingual country. However, we do not seem to attach equal value to all of them, or to all the people who speak to them. In some contexts, speaking a particular South African language becomes a marker of belonging, while speaking another triggers suspicion.

This contradiction deserves attention during Heritage Month, because language has always been closely connected to how we understand identity and belonging. South Africa’s Constitution sought to dismantle linguistic hierarchies. Section 6 recognises 12 official languages, acknowledges the historically diminished status of indigenous languages, and requires the state to advance their use so that all official languages enjoy parity of esteem. The Bill of Rights also protects people’s rights to use their language and to participate in the cultural life of their choice. The constitutional vision is ambitious: linguistic diversity should be a resource for democratic citizenship, not a basis for exclusion. Three decades into democracy, we need to ask whether the social implications of that vision have been fully embraced. South Africa is multilingual, but multilingualism is not experienced equally. Some languages carry greater institutional visibility, economic value and symbolic power than others.

English, for example, remains dominant in education, business and government. Afrikaans also continues to occupy an important position in many spaces. Among African languages, the demographic weight of isiZulu and isiXhosa gives them a visibility that smaller languages do not enjoy. There is nothing inherently wrong with languages having different numbers of speakers. The problem, we argue, arises when linguistic differences harden into a hierarchy of human value.

Despite its profound multilingualism, South Africa continues to experience forms of linguaphobia in which language becomes a means of distinguishing who belongs and who doesn’t. Linguaphobia draws attention to the ways linguistic difference becomes a basis for anxiety, suspicion, exclusion, and the policing of belonging. It encompasses the ways in which speech, accent, pronunciation, vocabulary, and linguistic affiliation become markers through which bodies are heard, classified, and positioned in relation to the nation.

Language becomes one of the central means through which difference is heard, identified, and marked. This is where we need to distinguish multilingualism from intercultural competence. Multilingualism describes a linguistic condition while intercultural competence describes a capacity. A multilingual country may contain many languages without its citizens knowing how to communicate across differences. We believe that intercultural competence is far more demanding. It is the ability to encounter people whose linguistic practices and histories differ from our own without turning that difference into deficiency or “foreignness”.

This is important especially in post-apartheid South Africa. Apartheid was built through systems of classification, and language was deeply implicated in that machinery. The post-apartheid Constitution sought a different principle in which linguistic difference should be recognised and protected. It is important to be wary of reproducing hierarchies of belonging through language. Language education has a crucial role here.

Learning another South African language should not mean merely acquiring vocabulary and grammar. It should cultivate an ability to encounter another person’s linguistic and cultural world. What this means is that speaking a language without a deep value of intercultural competence is almost self-defeating. Intercultural competence and the ability to be tolerant and empathise with others are important in universities, hospitals, workplaces and communities. Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking which languages are genuinely South African, we should ask what kind of society allows different languages to coexist without turning difference into hierarchy or a site of animosity. The Constitution does not ask us to choose one language to represent South Africa. It demands of us to treat all official languages equitably. Turning that principle into social practice means learning languages beyond our own, listening to accents without suspicion, and accepting that African identities have always crossed borders.

It means accepting a difficult truth: there is no single way of sounding South African. This Heritage Month, perhaps the most important language to learn is the language of empathy and openness, one in which difference does not automatically mean foreignness. That is the promise of multilingualism. The harder task is learning how to live it.

*Sijadu is a lecturer in the Department of African Languages and Ncube a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at Stellenbosch University. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the university.