LANGUAGE, IDENTITY AND NATIONHOOD: LANGUAGE USE AND ATTITUDES AMONG XHOSA STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WESTERN CAPE, SOUTH AFRICA by Charlyn Dyers Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor Literarum (Linguistics) in the Faculty of Arts, University of the Western Cape Supervisor: Prof D.H. Gough (Dept. Linguistics, UWC) Joint Supervisors: Prof S.G.M. Ridge (Dept. English, UWC) Dr F. Banda (Dept. Linguistics, UWC) Submitted on: 22 September 2000 I declare that Language, Identity and Nationhood - Language Use and Attitudes among Xhosa Students at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa is my own work and that all the sources I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of complete references. Charlyn Dyers 22 September 2000 Contents Acknowledgements i Introduction to the thesis ii One: Background and Literature Survey 1 Two: Research Methodology 57 Three: Entry level patterns of language use and attitudes 92 Four: Longitudinal patterns of language use and attitudes 139 Five: Conclusions and Implications of the Study 193 Bibliography 218 Appendices: 257 I. Entry level survey questionnaire 258 II. Second year level survey questionnaire 266 III. Exit level survey questionnaire 272 IV. Entry level quantitative data 278 V. Entry level interviews 291 VI. Second year level interviews 296 VII. Exit level interviews 302 VIII. Entry level written responses 314 IX. Exit level written responses 318 X. UWC multiple choice answer sheet 321 XI. Map of South Africa showing origins of UWC students in 1997 322 XII. Interview with Prof K. Prah in the Argus, 15 May 1995 323 XIII. Longitudinal quantitative data and scattergrams 324 Summary 337 Acknowledgements All praise is due to God for granting me the mental and physical strength to carry out this study. Sincere thanks is also due to the following people: Prof David Gough, my principal supervisor, whose patience, experience and academic expertise were invaluable in enabling me to carry out my research; Prof Stanley Ridge and Dr Felix Banda, joint supervisors, for their valuable insights and advice; Messrs Ernest Smart and Edwin Duminy of UWC Information Services, for their help with processing my raw data and formatting the thesis; Mr Lorenzo Himunchul of the Educational Development Centre, Peninsula Technikon, for his invaluable assistance with my longitudinal statistics; Phakamani Dadlana and David Cupido, my research assistants, and all the students who participated in this study from 1996-8. I dedicate this thesis to my beloved daughter, Frances. i INTRODUCTION TO THE THESIS This thesis is a study of patterns of language attitudes and use among Xhosa home language speakers at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Speakers of Xhosa, according to Statistics South Africa 2000, form the second largest speech community in South Africa (17.9% of the total population), second only to speakers of Zulu (22.9% of the total population). The University of the Western Cape, which is situated just outside Cape Town, was originally intended to serve only the Coloured (mixed-race) population of South Africa. Coloureds form the majority group in the population of the Western Cape, one of the nine provinces of South Africa. In 1982, the university took the bold step of defying the apartheid regime, by opening its doors to students of all races. Students from all over South Africa now attend the university, but Xhosa students, drawn mainly from the provinces of the Eastern and Western Cape, form the largest language group or speech community on the campus. The thesis presents a study of the patterns of language attitudes and use with which Xhosa students enter the university, as well as patterns of change in language attitudes and use revealed by a longitudinal study of a smaller group of Xhosa students. The longitudinal part of the study tracked 20 students for three years, which is the minimum period ii for the completion of a degree in the Faculty of Arts, from which they were drawn. The analysis of the students’ patterns of language use provides the background to the core of the study - their attitudes to the eleven official languages of South Africa: English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, South Sotho, Pedi (North Sotho), Tswana, Swati, Venda and Ndebele. The considerable impact of language attitudes on language vitality, language policy and language acquisition in multilingual societies has led to the growth of language attitude studies in South Africa. While some studies have focused on individual languages, others have attempted to elicit attitudes to a number of languages in the same study in order to compare attitudes towards these languages. Many of these attitude studies have concentrated on English. There are various reasons for this choice. Sociolinguists have attempted to find out how a language spoken by only 9% of the population (Krige et al. 1994:2) gained so much power and prestige to become the dominant language of South Africa, and also how it maintains this power and continues to spread despite the fact that only 44% of the population understand it (Lund 1998:11). ‘Understand’ here ranges from the ability to carry out instructions to reading a newspaper with comprehension. Webb (1996) argues that this figure is even lower - iii only 25% - when one looks at the issue of functional literacy in English among black South Africans (i.e. being able to use it effectively in public life). McDermott (1998:111) dismisses as ‘particularly arrogant’ claims such as the following: • access to English is fundamental to African self-empowerment and to entering the international arena; and • those who lack English competency are ‘linguistically’ deprived. But others may deem it equally arrogant to argue that black South Africans need to change their attitudes towards their own languages and to stop desiring English, when its advantages are daily paraded before them by the prestige and status of those who use it. Webb and Kembo-Sure (1999:16) give what they consider ‘fairly self-evident’ reasons why black South Africans esteem English so highly - its status as the major world language; its provision of access to almost all sources of knowledge and entertainment; its dominant role in the world of work; its role as the language of the struggle against apartheid in contrast to the role of Afrikaans as the language of oppression, and so on. Attitude studies on Black South African Languages have looked at their status among their users in terms of their educational, economic, social and cultural value. Studies on the educational status of these languages have revealed that, iv while academics and teachers tend to agree that increased use of African languages in education is beneficial for learners, the general public perception is that increased mother-tongue education is inferior education. This attitude stems, in part, from the policies of the former apartheid regime, which wanted to divide blacks by emphasizing differences between their languages and cultural practices, and which elevated the use of the mother-tongue in education without also giving learners sufficient access to the languages of power, higher education and professional employment. The past and present situation regarding mother-tongue education in South Africa is summed up succinctly by de Wet and Niemann (1999:93): In many ways the National Party’s language in education policy for Blacks, with its emphasis on the mother-tongue in the first years of schooling, was a sound educational policy, but for the wrong reasons. Language in education policy was used to confirm racial separateness. It will be difficult to make South Africans understand that when the same policy, i.e. mother- tongue education, is advocated once more it is for quite different reasons. Politics motivated the ANC-dominated government’s decision to give 11 languages official status. All the major languages in v the country were given equal status in the spirit of democracy. Although this decision has educational merit, the masses prefer English as MOI, because of the association of mother-tongue education with oppression, as well as the belief that indigenous African languages have no economic, academic and social value. While studies have been carried out to measure white attitudes towards English and Afrikaans, most notably the study carried out by Hauptfleisch (1977), there have also been a few studies on attitudes towards Afrikaans among black South Africans, and the focus here has been on attitudes to Afrikaans in pre- and post-apartheid South Africa. Clearly, there have been changes in attitudes towards Afrikaans (Young et al. 1991), but the energetic actions of its protectors, most notably the Suid-Afrikaans Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (South African Academy for Science and Arts), may have a role to play in attempting to change attitudes towards the language. However, the change may also be caused by people who previously denied their Afrikaans backgrounds now feeling free to acknowledge it, particularly the Coloured population of the Western Cape Province, or those who were forced to move out of an Afrikaans-speaking area to be resettled in their separate ethnic homelands. vi One conclusion some current researchers have come to is that Afrikaans and the Black South African Languages need to re-define their roles in the face of the perceived and real importance of English in the lives of the majority of South Africans, and many of the current debates around language policy in South Africa focus on this re-definition of roles. However, there are also those who argue that South Africa’s indigenous black languages need to play much bigger roles in domains like education and employment. The final chapter of this thesis considers what implications the findings of this study have for some of the common assumptions on language in post-democratic South Africa.