South African Sign Language and language-in-education policy in South Africa

Abstract

Language planning and language policy issues and decisions are both significant and often controversial in the educational sphere. In the case of South Africa, language planning and language policy have a long and complex history in South Africa. Used in the apartheid era both to support Afrikaner nationalist objectives and as a pillar of ethnolinguistically separate education, language planning and policy have remained an important and divisive matter well into the new democratic era (cf. Heugh 1995, 2002; E. de Kadt 1996; Ridge 1996, 2004; Chisanga and Kamwangamalu 1997; Kamwangamalu 1997, 2004; Verhoef 1998; Reagan 2001, 2002a; Alexander 2004; J. de Kadt 2006).