rezore

Un nebeut saozneg war Rezore ! Evit displegiñ penaos e chom diaesamentoù e Afrika kreisteiz evit ar yezhoù komzet get ar re zu, daoust da nav anezhe bout anavezet barzh bonreizh ar vro abaoe 1994. Un peu d'anglais sur Rezore, pour présenter les difficultés des langues africaines en Afrique du sud malgré le fait que 9 d'entre elles soient reconnues officiellement dans la constitution du pays depuis 1994.

"Local languages of South Africa struggle to cut a path in educational system"

Fourteen years after the strict segregation regimen ended in South Africa, the autochthonous peoples of this country continue to fight for their cultural and linguistic rights. The speakers of Bantu languages (who sum up all together more than three fourths of the total South African population) witness how their own languages have still not obtained the long deserved equality with the two European origin languages spoken in South Africa (English and Afrikaans, a language which branches from Dutch). The educational system is essential and things are changing little by little. Just recently, the Zulu community obtained an important victory when a judge sentenced a century old secondary school in Durban (e Thekwini in Zulu) for discriminating against its students for using their mother language in the school.

Since 1994, following the end of the apartheid era, South Africa has had 11 official languages, two of them with European origins (Afrikaans and English) and 9 local languages (Zulu, Xhosa, Northern Sotho, Tswana, Sotho, Tsonga, Swazi, Venda and Ndebele). Theoretically, the constitution obliges the government to "heighten the status and increase the usage" of these African languages and also it forces that both the central government and the provincial governments use on a regular basis at least two languages. English maintains its status to a greater advantage above all other languages. Afrikaans, on the other hand, continues to be significant among the white community and is spoken by 13% of the country's total population, while among the local languages, Zulu is the most predominant (24% of the population's mother tongue or 10 million people, according to the 2001 census ).

Source: réseau Mercator