This paper sets out to formulate some of the economic reasons for the continuing dominance of English in the boardrooms, government forums, parastatals and laboratories of South Africa, to consider whether this situation is likely to change, and to assess the extent to which such a state of affairs is at odds with South Africa’s new language policy. The historical reasons for the dominance of English in this sphere are well known: the language’s imperial history, its status as a world language, its role as a medium for political opposition during the apartheid conflict, and the accumulation of capital and economic influence by English-speakers from the mid-nineteenth century onward. However, the day-to-day economic basis for the continuing dominance of English at the apex of South African society has hardly been considered.
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Barkhuizen, Gary & Ute Knoch
2006. Macro-Level policy and Micro-Level planning. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 29:1 ► pp. 3.1 ff.
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Hu, Guangwei
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Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M.
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Russell H. Kaschula & H. Ekkehard Wolff
2020. The Transformative Power of Language,
Mathebula, Nikiwe & Theodorus du Plessis
2010. Language policy-making in the Free State: an analysis of language policy activities between 1994 and 2007. Language Learning Journal 38:3 ► pp. 307 ff.
Mthombeni, Zama Mabel, Olusola Ogunnubi & May Cheng
2021. A socio-constructivist analysis of the bilingual language policy in South African higher education: Perspectives from the university of Kwazulu-natal. Cogent Education 8:1
Pervin, Nasrin & Nausheen Saba Siraj
2020. How Social Dynamics Influence a Developing Country’s Language Planning and Policy. Journal of Education 200:2 ► pp. 104 ff.
Posel, Dorrit, Mark Hunter & Stephanie Rudwick
2022. Revisiting the prevalence of English: language use outside the home in South Africa. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 43:8 ► pp. 774 ff.
2002. Language as a ‘resource’ in South Africa: The economic life of language in a globalising society. English Academy Review 19:1 ► pp. 2 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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