The Officialisation of South African Sign Language—What Is There to Gain?

Abstract

The Constitutional Review Committee's 2017 recommendation that the South African Constitution be amended to include South African Sign Language (SASL) as one of South Africa's official languages gives rise to the question: What gains will such a step bring for the Deaf community, given the special status this language already enjoys? This question is answered by undertaking a comparative study on language officialisation in South Africa from a language rights and language planning perspective. The impact of national officialisation in 1994 on the historically marginalised indigenous South African languages alongside English and Afrikaans and the officialisation of SASL is considered in comparison to the advance of SASL as a unique minority language of South Africa since 1996. The study identifies some anomalies regarding the relation between the officialisation of the historically marginalised indigenous languages and their current status in different language domains and proposes a strategy to overcome the structural limitations regarding language officialisation in South Africa.

Keywords:

• language officialisation
• sign language
• South African Sign Language
• language policy and planning
• language rights
• linguistic human rights
• minority languages