‘Death of the mother tongue’ – is English a glottophagic language in South Africa?

Abstract

This article reflects on the spread of English in South Africa, especially in the wake of the large-scale changes following the collapse of apartheid in the early 1990s. These changes allowed freer mixing of young South Africans of all backgrounds than had been hitherto possible in a segregated society. In particular, schools formerly reserved for Whites, opened their doors to initially small, then increasing numbers of pupils from other race groups: viz. Black, Coloured and Indian (this group is sometimes described as black in the general sense, in lower case, or non-whites in former apartheid-speak). The term Coloured in South Africa denotes communities of multiple ancestry, whose background encompasses the now obsolescent indigenous Khoe-San languages of the country as well as Bantu, European and Asian languages.