Language policy implementation in South African universities vis-a-vis the speakers of indigenous African languages' perception

Abstract

After the demise of apartheid in 1994, South Africa adopted a newconstitution that bolstered the image of indigenous African languagesthrough a multilingual language policy scenario. Indigenous Africanlanguages were further boosted by the National Language-in-EducationPolicy Acts that were propounded subsequent to the adoption of theConstitution of the Republic of South Africa in 1996 and the LanguagesBill that was promulgated in November 2012 (Mutasa, 2014). Given thesedevelopments, one would have hoped for changes in terms of perceptionsand language use in universities where the traces of the vestiges of thecolonial legacy were still apparent. The aim of this article is tohighlight the extent to which the language choices of universities andperceptions of academics and students impact on the process ofimplementing the multilingual language policies in universities.