It is important to promote South African sign language as it serves noble cause

South African Sign Language (SASL) is the smallest recognised language in SA. Although some of the country's deaf organisations claim that more than one million South Africans use the language, the 2011 census survey records only 234,655 citizens who use SASL as “first spoken language”.

One must keep in mind that this number may include naturally hearing children of deaf parents. By implication, the estimated one million figure therefore includes citizens who use SASL as an additional language, including a reasonable percentage of hard-of-hearing citizens, but of course also hearing citizens who have learned the language as a result of regular contact with deaf people.

As such, SASL ends up as a language of more or less the same order of magnitude as Ndebele (1,090,223 speakers), Swati (1,297,046 speakers) and Venda (1,209,388 speakers). In other words, within the group of “smaller” South African languages. One could also include the Non-Bantu Click Languages like Nama.

The question whether it is important to promote SASL therefore also has implications for SA's other smaller languages and, in this regard, for smaller languages in general. However, our Constitution does not draw any distinction between recognised South African languages in terms of size, but rather follows an egalitarian approach by envisaging the promotion of the recognised languages, regardless of their size.

Section 6 of the Constitution specifically entrusts the Pan-South African Language Board, a statutory body, with this responsibility by requiring of the council to promote the 11 official languages, the Non-Bantu Click Languages (including Nama) as well as “sign language [sic]” (by implication SASL) and at the same time create conditions for their development and use.

From a language planning point of view, this is already a particularly ambitious assignment, but in addition one that is assigned to a statutory body; institutions about which there is a healthy degree of cynicism in SA given their dubious performance since 1994.

Nevertheless, according to Harald Haarmann, a leading language sociologist, the ideal typology of language cultivation and language planning provides that governmental and statutory institutions be relatively more effective with language promotion in terms of organisational impact than non-governmental and non-statutory institutions such as pressure groups, language organisations and individuals.

Effectiveness in this typology rests on a well-worked language plan that is indeed implemented. Where such institutions fall short, it goes without saying that non-governmental and non-statutory institutions will have to step in to save the day.

In the light of Pan-South African Language Board’s constitutional mandate, the opening question whether it is important to promote SASL (and in this respect also the other listed languages) is in fact irrelevant. This is important, because the Constitution requires it; it is that simple. One should therefore rather ask why the constitution considers the promotion of the three mentioned groups of languages important.

As a starting point, it will help to keep in mind that the Constitution links language promotion to language development and language use. In language planning terms, language development refers, among other things, to the development and standardisation of the language corpus and language code. These include the development of a writing system, grammar, glossaries, dictionaries, terminology, curricula, literature, etc. Such development is a prerequisite for the use of the language in education, both for teaching the language and the language as means of instruction.

Language distribution refers to how the language literally spreads through increasing use by the community within different contexts. Teaching also plays an important role in this – is the language taught as a subject but also as an additional or foreign language?

One way of trying to answer, why the Constitution considers the promotion of, among others, a language such as SASL important, is to look at the individual language rights that the Constitution grants, as contained in Chapter 2 of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Some of the more striking individual language rights come to the fore: Section 29 of the Bill of Rights guarantees the right of education in the official language(s) of your choice. Although SASL is not (yet) an official language in SA, the South African Schools Act stipulates that the language is regarded as an official language for the purposes of learning in a public school.

The institutionalisation of SASL as Home Language within the so-called CAPS system since 2014 is an obvious example of the effective promotion of the language by both a government body, in this case the department of basic education, and a statutory body, Umalusi, the Council for Quality Assurance in General and Further Education and Training. However, in order to promote the use of SASL, the language should now also be taught as an additional language.

Sections 30 and 31 of the Bill of Rights guarantee the cultural rights of the use of the language of your choice within the community and organisations of your choice. It goes without saying that the responsibility for language promotion actions within these contexts rests on the shoulders of pressure groups, cultural institutions and individuals.