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Intercultural Communication and Vocational Language Learning in South Africa: Law and Healthcare
The Constitution (1996) of the Republic of South Africa recognizes eleven of South Africa’s most spoken languages as official languages of the country. Of the eleven languages, nine are indigenous African languages and are spoken by about 80% of the total population. The other two, English and Afrikaans, were the only official languages of the pre-democratic regime and are spoken by the remainder of the population. However, when it comes to vocational training at institutions of higher learning, the common trend in South Africa in terms of linguistic composition is in reverse. About 80% of the total student population have English or Afrikaans as their home language, whilst the minority are speakers of indigenous African languages. This is reflected in language practices in the majority of institutions of higher learning where English and Afrikaans are the most common media of instruction. If one looks at this linguistic reality, it means that – should there be no vocational language training at tertiary level – the students trained in these institutions would not be able to cope in South Africa’s multilingual and multicultural environment as they would not be able to provide a service to the majority of the people they are supposed to serve, i.e. those speaking indigenous African languages.
This chapter makes use of the work of intercultural ...
