St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

Professor Rosemary Salomone‘s Commentary, “South Africa: A Court Decision with Consequences for Languages in HE,” appeared in the May 4th issue of University World News. Professor Salomone discusses a recent provincial court ruling upholding the decision of the University of South Africa (UNISA), a distance learning institution, to eliminate Afrikaans language courses and change to an all-English curriculum with supportive services offered in nine official African languages and in Afrikaans.

Focusing on principles laid out in the South African Constitution, she compares the court’s emphasis on multilingualism in the interests of “equity” and “practicality” to the Constitutional Court’s ruling this past December in the case against the University of the Free State where the decision weighed heavily on the need to “redress past wrongs.” She questions whether the new multilingual narrative will help steer post-apartheid South Africa beyond the past toward a consensus on the roles of English, Afrikaans, and other African languages, and whether it will influence the Constitutional Court in future cases, especially in the still pending litigation against Stellenbosch University, a bastion of white Afrikaner tradition.

Posted on May 9, 2018 at 2:13 pm in Uncategorized   |  RSS feed |   Reply   |   Trackback URL