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From the submissions that the Portfolio Committee on Arts and Culture has received this week concerning the proposed South African Languages Bill, it is clear that our country needs new legislation to give effect to the Constitution’s demand to promote and protect our languages.

Unfortunately, the proposed Bill does not promote multilingualism and does little to create conditions for the equitable treatment of all official languages.

There are a number of shortcomings in the Bill:
It does not promote multilingualism or create a conciliatory environment for nation-building and social cohesion.
Its focus on the use of a minimum of two official languages threatens to exclude and marginalize many of our indigenous languages.
It duplicates functions between the proposed Language Units, the Pan South African Languages Board (PanSALB) and the Department of Arts and Culture.
It lacks any real enforcement or complaints mechanism. This renders the Bill a toothless instrument, similar to PanSALB.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) believes that we need to have language legislation that enables all our citizens to be heard and to have access to services and information. The apartheid state never accommodated all the indigenous languages sufficiently. This is a wrong that must be put right.

Many interest groups have called for the Bill to be sent back and redrafted by the Minister. Unfortunately, this would likely mean that we would have to wait many more years before we ever saw a Languages Act. This is what happened to the SA Language Practitioners’ Council Bill, which was drafted in 1999 and is yet to be tabled.

The DA believes that it is possible to improve the current Bill through a robust committee revision process that will enable it to live up to its Constitutional requirements. In this regard we believe that the 2003 South African Languages Bill, which was sent back by Cabinet that same year, provides a good foundation for improving the current Bill. This will form the basis of our contributions in the portfolio committee when we deliberate on the Bill. We will do everything possible to ensure that the languages of all South Africans are promoted and protected.