Abstract:

Background:
The Republic of South Africa has a serious challenge of devising a language policy to satisfy all its language groups. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 108 of 1996 declared the following languages: English, Afrikaans, IsiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Siswati, Tshivenda and Xitsonga as the official languages of the country. In reality, English is still used for officialdom at the expense of other official languages in the areas of politics, education and commerce.

Purpose:
To analyse data with an intention to promote the use and status of South African previously marginalized official languages in official from Grade R to Tertiary education.

Methods:
A questionnaire of 10 statements was devised and used on 20 university students, 20 teachers from Gr1 to Grade 12, 10 university lecturers and 50 members of the public to establish their views on the present status quo of government language policy in education.

Results:
68% participants believed that, the present usage of the indigenous languages could be raised. The Pan South African Language Board Amendment Act of 1999 and the Language Act of 2012 should empower the Board to engage linguists and language experts to work out a meaningful language policy of the government to cover the educational, political and economic areas of the country. Lack of monitoring and managing the usage of all official languages may lead to language death. Therefore, the officialdom of those languages should be harmoniously implemented in order to survive the dominance of English.

Conclusion:
The usage and status of the previously marginalized languages is a call for concern especially in the educational, political and economic spheres of this country. The fear is that the previously marginalized languages will be swallowed out of existence by the hegemony mainly of English. Therefore, serious intervention needs to be done by the government in consideration with the involvement of linguists and language experts at national, provincial and local spheres.

References:
[1] Alexander, N. 1989. Language Policy and National Unity in South Africa/Azania. Cape Town: Creda Press.
[2] Kamwangamalu, N.M. 2000. Language policy and mother-tongue education in South Africa: The case for market-oriented approach. In: Alatis, J.E., Hamilton, H.E. & Tan, A-H. (eds.). Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics 2000. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press: 119-134.
[3] Ricento, T. 2006. An Introduction to Language Policy. Great Britain: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd.
[4] Fishman, J.A. 1989. Language and ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic
Perspective. Great Britain: WBC Print Bristol.
[5] Mann, C.C. 2000. Reviewing ethnolinguistic vitality. The case of Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4/3: 458-474

Keywords:

Constitution, policy, marginalized, implementation, monitoring.