Mapping the road to multilingualism in South Africa

Abstract

The entrenchment of multilingualism in the South African Constitution articulated the need for a national policy and a legal framework on the basis of which government bodies could take the measures necessary for the implementation of the constitutional directives on multilingualism. This article analyses the process of writing a policy and this framework since 1995. Three phases are covered: the work of the Language Plan Task Group; the Language Plan of the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, and the contributions of the Advisory Panel on Language Policy.