Language Attitudes and Ethnolinguistic Identity in South Africa: A Critical Review

My original intention with this paper was to provide a diagnosis of the state of the African languages of South Africa: whether these languages are being maintained or are shifting to English. This was to be achieved through an analysis of sociohistorical data and recent language-attitude research and the use of a number of theoretical frameworks. It was based, furthermore, on the assumption that these languages share a similar past and, inasmuch as the ecological status of a language is affected by broad sociohistorical factors, that they would share certain tendencies. So, for example, as recently summarised by De Klerk & Barkhuizen (2002:11), there is in South Africa "persistent functional deficiency and low levels of development for indigenous languages in terms of corpus, status, and prestige". In short, all the indigenous languages of South Africa seem to be in the same state, and for the same reasons. On unsuccessfully attempting to squeeze all the relevant facts and analyses into a 25 minute paper I soon realised, however, that I had best focus on only one language and only on a limited range of theoretical issues. The similarities between the African languages of South Africa do, however, allow one to make some hypotheses about the ecological status of all these languages based on a study of one of them. The focus of this paper will be isiXhosa, a Nguni language spoken mainly in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, where I currently work and live, the Western Cape Province, the capital of which is Cape Town, and to a much lesser degree in the Free-State, Gauteng, North West and even other provinces of South Africa (see Figure 1 & De Klerk & Barkuizen 2002:12). The Eastern Cape is what one might call the "heartland" of the isiXhosa-speaking people.