- Title
- Learning Zulu: a secret history of language in South Africa
- Creator
- Wylie, Dan
- Date
- 2017
- Type
- book review
- Type
- text
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/61255
- Identifier
- vital:27997
- Identifier
- https://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/view/160848
- Description
- Taking a leaf from the book under review, I’ll start by injecting an autobiographical element. Much of what Sanders examines here echoes my own experience, after Zimbabwe’s independence, of heading to a remote mission school to teach for two years. Part of my purpose was to learn better Shona, the majority language from which I had been systematically discouraged by my colonial education. It was, in a way, a gesture of reparation, or addressing a nagging “white guilt”, or at least of assuaging a sense of fruitless loss and exclusion. I was nowhere near as successful in attaining fluency as Sanders seems have been in learning Zulu; and now that I live in the Eastern Cape, my efforts to learn Xhosa have been similarly patchy and faltering. One thing is evident throughout Sanders’s dense discussions: long-term, assiduous application and pe¬riods of total immersion are vital—and as he points out, few whites in South Africa have carved out the time and energy to do so, while willy-nilly expecting the black majority to learn their language. (An endnote does aver that, according to census figures, a surprising 16,000-plus whites, and a similar number of Indians, in KwaZulu-Natal, list Zulu as their first language.)
- Format
- 5 pages, pdf
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Tydskrif vir letterkunde, Wylie, D., 2017. Learning Zulu: A secret history of language in South Africa, Tydskrif vir letterkunde 54 vol. 2 no. 182 186 2017
- Rights
- Tydskrif vir letterkunde
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Tydskrif vir letterkunde Copyright Statement
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RU Department of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies
Wylie, Dan (Emeritus Prof)
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | Adobe Acrobat PDF | 190 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |