There is growing consensus among language planning scholars that, in developing languages such as those of Africa, there is a need for a deliberateeffort to effectuateand acceleratethe process of language intellectualisation.Intellectualisationof the African languages should be seen within the context of national development initiatives. This paper examines the situation in South Africa where the government is obliged by the Constitution to develop all official languages, especially the indigenous languages. Although all nine indigenous languages have been partially developed, that is, they have written forms, literary works, dictionaries and terminology lists, they are lagging far behind in the area of modern terminology as compared to the neo-colonial languages. During the apartheid regime, the indigenous languages were only important in so far as they served as tools for the division of the African people into conflicting and competing so-called ethnic groups. Despite many problems, with a clear national language policy and plan, intellectualisation in South Africa is more likely to succeed than in most developing countries. Research that is being conducted on strategies towards language intellectualisation provides a strong sense of optimism that this process of language intellectualisation will achieve increasing degrees of momentum, support and success.
This study concentrates on the interaction between languages with similar morphological and syntactic structures. It will show that code switching between morphosyntactically similar languages ofequal social function has certain implicationsfor the matrix language-frame modelfor code switching which has been developed by Myers-Scotton (1993b). The two languages under scrutiny here are Southern Sotho and Tswana, two very closely related and functionally equivalent languages spoken in South Africa. In certain contexts the Speakers ofthese languages will switch frequently from the one language to the o t her. The paper will investigate how the matrix language in this multiple switching can be determined and whether the distinction between the matrix and the embedded language is still relevant in such a Situation. Given the relatedness ofthe two languages, the implicationsfor the constraints which the matrix language-frame model proposes will also be examined. The paper concludes that in this case an interlanguage has developed which must be regarded äs a merger between the two languages. This is particularly salient in the South African context since the harmonisation of the Sotho and Nguni languages respectively has been put forward äs the Nhlapo-Alexander proposal (Alexander 1989).
Rapid urbanization and the approach adopted by the authorities during the previous dispensation have left the new democratic government with townships and informal settlements on the peripheries of the urban concentrations of South Africa. Contact at all levels between Speakers of the nine Bantu languages of South Africa, together with the process of modernization, characterize the social dynamics of these urban societies. The result has been multilingual communities that interact on a daily basis in the urban areas and their peripheries in both a dynamic and complex ränge of contexts. Multilingual interaction fuelled by the competitive forces of supply and demand coupled with the free movement of communities have resulted in a hybrid form of identity, which distinguishes urban people from their rural counterparts. This paper examines the relationships that exist between the languages and Speech varieties of some selected urban communities and their ethnic and assumed linguistic identities. It has been found that the boundaries and distinctions between ethnic identities and the identities assumed by urban residents become blurred and indistinct, with their lifestyles and sociocultural characteristics changing äs they are absorbed within the urban areas of South Africa.
Mixed Language,' a characteristic pattern of language use among African township residents in South Africa, may well include words or full constituents from several languages. However, from both a structural and a social perspective, such speech has a systematic nature. In reference to grammatical structure, within any CP (projection of COMP) showing codeswitching, only one language (the Matrix Language) provides the grammatical frame in the data studied. Also, while speakers from different educational levels engage in codeswitching with similar frequencies, the types of codeswitched constitutents they prefer are different. In reference to the social use of language, we argue that specific patterns of codeswitching indicate how language is both an index of identity and a tool of communication in South Africa. In the codeswitching patterns they use, speakers exhibit strong loyalty to their own first languages. Yet, because they recognize that codeswitching facilitates communication with members of other ethnic groups, they use a number of codeswitching strategies as a means of accommodating to their addressees and simultaneously as a means of projecting multiple identities for themselves.
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