The Demise of Sesotho Language in the Democratic South Africa and its Impact on the Socio-cultural Development of the Speakers

Bibliographic Data

ID19452277
AuthorsVictor Solomon Monare Moeketsi (Central University of Technology: FS, P.O. Box I881, Welkom 9460 South Africa, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume5
Issue2
Pages217-224
Publication date2014-04-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Sociology and Social Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0976-6634 • E-ISSN: 2456-6764
PublisherKamla Raj Enterprises (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1080/09766634.2014.11885626
OpenAlexW2188052891
LanguageEN
Citations received2

The Constitution of South Africa provides for eleven official languages, and all of them have equal status, but Afrikaans and English are unfairly privileged over Black languages. This state of affairs has therefore resulted in the possible death of Black languages. The aim of this paper is therefore; to examine factors that have led to possible demise of Black languages in the new democratic South Africa, and emphasis is placed on the Sesotho language spoken in the Free State and Southern Gauteng provinces. It has been observed that the speed at which Sesotho is dying out is currently having negative consequences in the lives of the speakers, as they struggle to organize their world around them. Further, the Sesotho language has been extremely stigmatized to the extent that the speakers between the ages of 15 – 30 cannot speak and write the language properly. It is for these reasons that the researcher examined factors that contributed to this state of affairs in the post-Apartheid South Africa

Constitution · Demise · Democracy · First language · Language shift · Languages of Africa · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Linguistic research and analysis · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Multilingual Education and Policy

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub