Lingonomics

Afrikaans and how to safeguard the future of minority languages

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A week or so ago, South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument was lit up in orange as thousands protested against the new BELA Bill. For those unfamiliar with the debate, two clauses in the already-signed Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill will allow provincial authorities to determine the language of instruction in South African schools, instead of the school governing bodies. The fear is that Afrikaans mother-tongue education will disappear and, so too, the language itself.

But, I wonder, can a language truly be destroyed by the passing of a single piece of legislation? Do we fully understand the reasons why some languages thrive while others fade away?

These are questions without easy answers. One school of thought, articulated by the German sociologist Max Weber, puts it plainly: language is politics, a way for political elites to include or exclude groups. Consider Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi’s comment on X about the StopBELA protest: ‘It’s not about education, but [about] those who hate us with a passion. [It’s] just because they don’t want our children to study and learn together. The doors of learning and culture will be opened for all.’ Lesufi would agree with Weber that language is political, and that the state, therefore, is the institution that must promote – or, in this case, perhaps suppress – language. It was the state that created Afrikaans, this school of thought might say, and thus the state that can also destroy it.

But there are other views too. Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, wrote in the 1970s that language is a form of symbolic capital that grants people access to social and economic resources. Language is not merely a tool of political elites; it is also a practice through which communities themselves give meaning to their world. Thus, when communities defend their language, they are not just defending a form of communication but also their identity and the social capital that comes with it. Here’s Flip Buys, chairperson of the Solidarity Movement that organised the protest: ‘It is out of love for our task, our heritage, and the country.’

Here’s a blunt way for an economist to summarise it: there is a market for language, and languages grow or shrink depending on their economic value, broadly defined, relative to the costs of learning them. A prime example of this is how English has taken over the world over the past century. It thrives because it is linked to economic opportunities, scientific innovation and technological progress. By the same logic, one could argue that languages like Afrikaans – or any minority language – will struggle to compete; for those with the ability to choose a first language for their children, English might seem like the language of upward mobility. It’s not just a matter of heritage, culture or identity: economic considerations, whether we like to admit it or not, are significant.

(Consider the Stellenbosch language debate in this light. Yes, there are strong cultural reasons to want to preserve Afrikaans as an academic language, but isn’t the intense desire for Afrikaans at Stellenbosch simply an attempt to give Afrikaans speakers, who are currently losing spots to better-performing English-speaking students, an economic advantage?)

An Irish example helps to test these ideas. The Irish language is dying out; after more than a century of efforts to revive it, UNESCO still classifies it as ‘definitely endangered’. Fewer than 120,000 people can speak Irish – only 1.6% of Ireland’s population – and all of those who speak Irish also speak English. It’s not even the most popular second language in Ireland anymore.

This wasn’t always the case, write Alan Fernihough, Chris Colvin, and Eoin McLaughlin, three Irish economic historians, in a recent working paper. On the eve of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, an estimated 2 million people communicated daily in Irish. By 1851, after the famine, that number had dropped to 1.5 million, or 23% of the population. Fifty years later, fewer than 800,000 people could speak Irish, and despite considerable effort and money, the numbers have continued to decline. The authors ask: why?

The Irish, as one might expect, have many explanations for the destruction of their language. The most common is simply that English, as a colonial language, was forced upon them. But that explanation is too simplistic. The English undoubtedly played a role by imposing English in schools during the 19th century, but government policy has changed significantly over time, especially after independence in the 20th century. If it were solely about government policy, wouldn’t the language have recovered, particularly given the deliberate efforts to support it?

No, write the authors, it’s other factors, particularly economic ones. Education played a role, yes, but not as significant a role as they initially thought; in short, it wasn’t just those with good education who decided to stop speaking Irish. In fact, the results show that the Catholic Church, often responsible for teaching, actually helped to protect Irish through its policy of bilingualism for priests.

Geography plays a central role. Irish-speaking areas closer to cities or English-speaking towns with better economic opportunities Anglicised more quickly. Learning English became especially essential after the Great Famine, as English provided access to better job opportunities and the possibility of emigration, particularly to America.

But death and despair do not inevitably drive language decay. One could use the Anglo-Boer War as a counterexample. Here too, there was destruction and high mortality. The expectation would have been that Afrikaans would disappear, swallowed by the language of industry and commerce. And yet, the opposite happened to Afrikaans in the 20th century. To what extent economic factors were responsible for this is a fantastic research question for a prospective Economics PhD student.

One interesting finding from the Irish study is the role of intergenerational transmission. One of the most important factors predicting the survival of Irish over the decades, the authors find, is whether older people in the same household spoke the language. This makes sense; you only learn a language by being exposed to it, and when the adults stop speaking it, it becomes difficult for children to learn the language. What’s fascinating, however, is that this also applies to older people in the village or region, not just in the household. In other words, even if you grew up in a household where the adults spoke Irish, but everyone else in the village spoke English, you were likely to lose your ability to speak Irish.

For a language to survive, there must be enough people around you speaking it. Parents will only teach it to their children if they believe it has economic value. When the benefits of first-language English outweigh the costs of English as a second language (or no English), minority languages like Afrikaans will decline, as it has done for the last decade; according to Nielsen BookScan, between 2010 and 2023, the share of Afrikaans books as a proportion of the value of all books sold in South Africa has declined from 17% to 11%.

As the Irish example shows, it’s a vicious cycle. The smaller the pool of speakers, the lower the economic value for those who do speak it, and the weaker the incentive to learn the language, especially for children.

How to break this cycle – and whether it should even be attempted – is not clear to me. For many readers of this blog and for me, Afrikaans might be the language of our hearts, but the reality is, if we want to preserve it for our children, it must also become the language of our wallets. BELA is only a beginning.

This is an edited and translated version of my monthly column, Agterstories, on Litnet. Amid the decline of serious, balanced opinions globally and the reduction of Afrikaans in higher functions in South Africa, LitNet seeks to offer a space for those interested in current events and critical thinking. The images for this post were created using Midjourney v6.