Ineffective Implementation of Language Policy in South African Higher Education: Mapping the Contribution of Family Language Policy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1610.01Keywords:
language policy in higher education, indigenous African languages, bottom-up language ideologies, family language policy, South African universitiesAbstract
South Africa’s language policy landscape has been lauded as a progressive model for many African countries, particularly due to its intentional drive to promote multilingualism and elevate historically marginalised indigenous African languages at various levels of education. However, language policy implementation has largely remained ineffective and symbolic. Within the South African higher education sector, inadequate government support for policy operationalisation and enduring colonial language ideologies that valorise and legitimise English as the language of social, educational, and economic advantage have been cited as militating against the realisation of a truly multilingual and transformed university. In this article, we draw on a framework that agitates for an approach that acknowledges interactions between top-down language policy directives and bottom-up community language ideologies. Through an analysis of language policy documents and secondary literature, we build on the adage that ‘charity begins at home’ to argue that resistance to top-down university language policies is very much a function of ideologies and dispositions towards indigenous languages that are shaped within the home, a dimension known as family language policy. We therefore propose an approach that reconciles national language policy objectives with bottom-up ideologies by placing families at the centre of the macro language policy wheel.
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