The decline of Afrikaans and institutional bilingualism at Stellenbosch University

Lloyd Hill, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology,

Thursday 14 November 2024, 13:00-14:30 (SAST), Room 401, Arts Building.

Following the 1994 democratic transition and the c.2002 consolidation of the higher education sector, it became all but impossible to sustain Afrikaans within the historical framework of institutional monolingualism. Under pressure to transform, historically Afrikaans universities (HAUs) shifted to various forms of institutional bilingualism. Stellenbosch University resisted the trend towards parallel medium instruction, but here “multilingual” language planning effectively ushered in a dual-medium form of intuitional bilingualism. This model broke down in the aftermath of the #FeesMustFall protests of 2015/16. In the heat of the protests, the University redrafted its language policy and effectively established English as the primary medium of teaching at the undergraduate level. This resulted in heated debate (a new phase of the taaldebat) and litigation, which ended in a Constitutional Court ruling upholding the policy shift. In this seminar, I explore the post-1994 decline of Afrikaans as a public academic medium and the transitional nature of the dual-medium model at Stellenbosch University. My analysis treats language as an institutional phenomenon, not simply an individual competence, and foregrounds the intersection of language, race and social class in South African higher education.