Author: Ridge, Stanley G. M.

Source: Language Problems & Language Planning, Volume 28, Number 2, 2004 , pp. 199-215(17)

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Abstract:

No language is one thing. It has different profiles and functions for different groups of people in different settings. In an environment where it is widely used and enjoys high status, its L1 users will potentially draw on its full grammatical, lexical, idiomatic and rhetorical range and employ it across all domains, often confidently adding to its store by borrowing from other languages. In an environment where it is little used or has lower status, it may be supplanted in some domains for its L1 users by another language or languages, with the repertoire in the remaining domains protected by very conservative attitudes, or it may increasingly be creolised. Characteristically, L2 users employ a smaller repertoire and use the language in fewer domains. However, the boundary between L1 and L2 users is permeable, and the actual domain and repertoire range for the L2 users varies greatly, depending on language attitudes related to social significance and economic utility. But the social and multilingual complexity of South Africa extends further. In a country with eleven main languages distributed very unevenly across the map, it is inevitable that many will be foreign in the familiar environments of most citizens. People learning languages which are foreign to them have a restricted grammatical, lexical, idiomatic and rhetorical repertoire, and use the language in very limited domains, if at all, unless they move outside their home areas or habitual social networks. In a multilingual society, like South Africa, in a time of major social and economic transition many do. Mutlidirectional social mobility and rapid urbanisation make the FL user potentially a user of the same language as L2, with a high need to use it well if he or she is to survive or succeed. Language planning in South Africa has accordingly to recognise a sociolinguistic continuum of use from FL to L2 to L1 if it is to meet the needs of citizens in a period of rapid planned transition and unplanned change. This article presents a review and critique of language planning for English in South Africa in relation both to the simplifications of policy and the complexity of actual patterns of language use.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lplp.28.2.06rid

Affiliations: 1: University of the Western Cape

Publication date: 2004-01-01

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