The Democratic Alliance (DA) and student organisation StudentePlein have taken its battle with Stellenbosch University (SU) to court over the institution's language policy.

Both filed papers at the Western Cape High Court on Thursday.

The DA accused the university of using Covid-19 as a ploy to do away with Afrikaans.

In the notice of motion, the DA and StudentePlein asked that the decision of the university's senate to deviate from the provisions of the institution's language policy and to make changes to the university's faculties language implementation plans in the four semesters during 2020 and 2021, be declared unconstitutional, unlawful and in violation of the policy.

In the affidavit, the DA's Stellenbosch constituency head Leon Schreiber said: "The university failed to comply with its language policy to the detriment of Afrikaans students."

In March, News24 reported that the university's senate accepted a recommendation from its academic planning committee that it deviate from faculties' language implementation plans for the first semester of this year.

This allowed lecturers to only have to make new learning material available in English and not in Afrikaans as well, as stipulated in the university's current language policy.

Initially, this would have applied only to the first semester of 2021, owing to the additional workload caused by the shift to more online tuition because of Covid-19, the university said, and only new learning material would be affected as learning material that already exists in Afrikaans would still be provided.

But, according to the affidavits, the evidence showed this was not true, as the deviation from the requirement to make Afrikaans learning material available remained in place after four consecutive semesters.

In StudentePlein's affidavit, chairperson Tobias Alberts stated that the senate's latest decision violated the university's 2016 language policy.

Instead of decisions concerning the language of tuition for individual modules being taken or requested by faculties [as required by the policy], the senate has approved and imposed changes to the approved deviations from language plans on faculties for the past four semesters. That is unlawful.

Alberts added in his affidavit that the decisions also impeded on home language teaching for Afrikaans students and violated section 29(2) of the Constitution, which was the right to basic education.

Schreiber said in a statement: "The management and senate of the university, both under the leadership of Rector Wim de Villiers, have disregarded and broken the institution's own language policy by using the Covid pandemic as an excuse to do away with Afrikaans learning material."

University spokesperson Martin Viljoen said the university would respond to the merits of the case.

"SU has, on a number of occasions, pointed out that there was no deviation from the language policy, but consulted and approved changes to the language arrangements in certain faculties.

"SU's 2016 language policy makes full provision for this. SU remains committed to Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in an inclusive, multilingual context – one of very few higher education institutions in our multilingual country following this approach," he said.

The university adopted a new language policy in 2016 that provided for a full offering in English as to achieve full accessibility to the university for academically deserving prospective and current students who preferred to study in English.

At the same time, the university said it managed the Afrikaans offering so as to sustain access to SU for students who preferred to study in Afrikaans and to further develop Afrikaans as a language of tuition where reasonably practicable.