By or for the speakers? Revitalization the Tshivenda language in South Africa
Keywords:
Linguistic policy, revitalization, officialization, corpusAbstract
After the end of the Apartheid system, in 1996, a new South African Constitution expanded the list of official languages, adding nine indigenous languages to English and Afrikaans. As Spolsky (2009) states, recognition causes the change of status from dialect to language.The création of the Pan South African Language Board and other chan- ges in the Constitution show interest in integrating society through language policies. Tollefson (2015) argües that language planning is important in the création and continuation of systems of inequality. In this case, the officialization of languages is used as an instrument for integration. In the context of Language Activism Month in South Africa in 2018, an English-Tshivenda bilingual dictionary was presen- ted.This public policy sought to contribute to the officialization of Tshivenda and to its revitalization process. For his part, a Tshivenda speaker created an application for mobile devices, Gudani TshiVenda, to learn the language, which pursues objectives similar to those of public policy.This work is framed in the field of language policy and planning. It is part of qualitative research traditions (Hernández Sam pieri et al., 2014;Vasilachis, 2006; Festinger & Katz, 1992), more specifically, in that we have conducted interviews with members of Pan-SALB and the creator of the mobile application, and in the reading of legal documents and publications made by PanSALB.An attempt will be made to understand the logic of both language policies and compare them in order to observe which actors and sectors were involved in each one, and which aspects of the language are involved.
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