Language rights, intercultural communication and the law in South Africa

This article seeks to explore the present language scenario in courts of law. The article makes use of section 6 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996), as a point of departure. At face value this section seems to entrench the language rights of individuals. This would mean that individuals could request trials to be held in their mother tongues, with fluent and competent speakers of that mother tongue sitting on the bench. However, this has not materialised. Contrary to popular opinion, the article argues that individual language rights are to some extent entrenched in the Constitution, but there are no mechanisms to secure such rights in the public domain. The article argues that it is often only language privileges that are preserved in institutions such as the justice system. Legally speaking, there is an obligation on the State to provide interpreters to facilitate access to all eleven official languages in courts of law. This in itself presents numerous challenges. The article argues further that the corollary to this is that there is very little space for intercultural communication in courts of law (as defined by Ting-Toomey, 1999, and Gibson, 2002). There has been little or no capacity building in this regard. It is English, to some extent Afrikaans, and the western cultural paradigm, which prevails. The result is further communication breakdown and language intolerance. In this article, the notion of language rights in courts of law is explored against the backdrop of existing theories of intercultural communication

The role of discourse in identity formation and the manufacture of ethnic minorities in Zimbabwe

The notion of ethnic minorities is a highly contested subject that cannot be fully explained in terms of demographic facts alone as it is indexically linked to struggles over sociopolitical power, cultural domination and control. Ethnic minorities have to be conceptualised as fluid and transitory phenomena mediated and reconstituted by various forms of discursive practices. Drawing on primary and secondary data collected in Zimbabwe, this paper problematises the role of discourse in the manufacture of ethnic minorities for purposes of social exclusion and other related forms of discrimination. Chief among the discourses of constructing ethnic minorities considered in this paper are the following: discursive practices underwriting the hegemony of dominating ethnic groups; the use of languages as prime markers of ethnic and national identity; as well as the appropriation and abuse of terminology such as ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ in pursuit of exclusionary political agendas