Between the Local and the Global: South African Languages and the Internet^[1]

Herman Wasserman

1. Introduction

The topic of South African languages and the Internet can be viewed from a number of different angles. Although presenting some very specific questions, the topic is also related to more general debates and theories surrounding globalisation and culture. Because of the complexity and range of these debates and theories, a narrowing of focus is necessary. In this essay I will therefore seek to establish how the position and use of South African languages on the Internet form part of a broader discourse regarding language, culture and power in postcolonial South Africa. These questions are not only political and social in nature, but also economic; they are not only internal to South Africa, but also have bearing on the process of globalisation, they stem not only from the present South African dispensation, but also pertain to the country’s colonial past. Because the position of South African languages on the Internet is determined by global as well as local processes - part of the dialectic of globalisation’s disembedding forces and the re-embedding provided by localities (Tomlinson 1999:61) - these two areas of influence will first be considered separately before going on to a brief exploration of how they relate to the specifics of the South African situation.

The global picture

2.1 The Internet and globalisation

The technological transformation of global media has fundamentally changed the character of communication. The Internet is at the centre of the information technology industry, and has come to epitomise the “information superhighway” of which the significance in shaping culture can hardly be overestimated (Castells 2000:161, 356-357, Nyamnjoh 1999:32). Especially since the 1990’s the Internet underwent accelerated development, notably with the invention of the World Wide Web in 1990 in Geneva and the production of the first web browser in 1994 (Castells 2000:50-51). These developments made the Internet user-friendly even for the uninitiated, turning it into a fast-growing communications medium with far-reaching effects on professional as well as private group and personal level. Because the Internet contributes to the time-space compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as interconnected and interdependent, it could be seen as one of the most recent developments in the acceleration of globalisation (cf. Barker 1999:34, Tomlinson 1999:2).

Although globalisation can be seen in terms of the world capitalist economy, the connections between states, the world military order and global information systems (Barker 1999:34), it also for a large part concerns issues of culture and identity, and the way these are influenced by power relations. Language, as one of the foremost markers of cultural or group identity[2] (cf. Kelman 1972:199-200), is part of this cultural sphere. Two broad schools of thought can be discerned pertaining to globalisation and culture. Because globalisation is seen as a force emanating from the so-called developed world, some critics envisage the destruction of localities and cultural specificities within minority countries and communities. On the other hand, some critics argue that global and local forces interact in the process of globalisation, making it a multidirectional process from which local cultures and languages can benefit and even draw empowerment. Let us briefly look at these two approaches before focusing on the South African situation.

2.2 The Internet as an exponent of global cultural imperialism

One of the important aspects that led some critics to view the development of information technologies as fostering media and cultural imperialism, is the projected negative impact the Internet might have on cultural and linguistic minorities[3] (Nyamnjoh 1999:36-37, El-Sherif 2001). These critics contend that the “global village” created by new informational technologies masks fundamental inequalities and dominance by Western culture and the English language, that it serves capitalist interests and has a homogenising effect on culture and identity (Barker 1999:38).

Within the globalised world order, English is at the top of the hierarchy of dominance. It is the most commonly spoken second language and the lingua franca in the international business, media, scientific and academic worlds. While some welcome English as a means of communication with the potential of overcoming the global tower of Babel, others argue that minority languages might become threatened by “language death” (Tomlinson 1999:78-79). On the Internet specifically, English is also the dominant language. Also in non-English speaking countries there are many websites that do make use of English, because of the presumption that English provides better access to the international community (Kaschula & De Vries 2000). The dominance of English is however also correlated to Internet access — the English-speaking world still displays the fastest growth in the number of Internet hosts as opposed to, for instance, the French- or German-speaking world (Kaschula & De Vries 2000). This dominance of English on the Internet is one of the reasons why cybertechnologies are sometimes seen as “tools of a continuing colonial globalisation” (Wood 1997) that threatens indigenous minority cultures.

However, it has also been pointed out that the Internet could enable these minority cultures to offer resistance against the cultural hegemony of the West (Wood 1997).

2.3 The Internet as a facilitator of multi-directionality

Although the Internet has contributed to accelerated globalisation, this does not necessarily entail a one-way traffic from the North to the South or the West to the rest. Many commentators are of the opinion that the Internet has radically decentred positions of speech, democratised cultural production and created the opportunity for local and global cultures to interact. Because the Internet in this view also provides the opportunity for local communities to access global resources, it can contribute to a postcolonial “writing back” to the global metropoles and serve as a means of survival and dissemination of local languages and cultures:

If globalism is not simply a result of top-down dominance but a transcultural process, a dialectic of dominant cultural forms and their appropriation, then the responses of local communities become critical. By appropriating strategies of representation, organisation and social change through access to global systems, local communities and marginal interest groups can both empower themselves and influence those global systems (Aschroft et al. 1998:113-114).

The argument that the Internet as a mass medium merely subjects indigenous cultures to hegemonic discourses from the West, furthermore does not take into account the principle of the “active audience”, namely that media users are not merely effects being produced by texts, but are themselves also actively producing meaning. They interact with the texts from within their own contexts and are also able to resist certain meanings and re-interpret them (Barker 1999:110). Internet users should therefore also be seen as cultural agents rather than merely docile subjects succumbing to globalising forces.

Wood (1997), in referring to the utilisation of new technologies by Hawaiians, has shown that the Internet can also be appropriated by minority cultures as a means of cultural empowerment. The formation of virtual communities in cyberspace makes it possible for groupings such as these to consolidate their cultural identities in spite of societal constraints or geographical borders. The empowering of minorities means the creation of possibilities for indigenous languages to come into their own on the Internet. Kaschula & De Vries (2000) are of the opinion that the Internet “liberates languages from finite communicative resources and provides an economically competitive platform for the dissemination of material (…)”. The use of non-English languages on the Internet has (globally) soared in recent years, even though English is still used in 57,4% of Internet activities (Kaschula & De Vries 2000).

When seen in this way, the Internet does not necessarily cause the elimination of locality and particularity, but has the potential of setting in motion the interaction of local cultures and languages with global influences. The result is the creation of a new form between the local and the global, a so-called glocality (Tomlinson 1999:9). This means that while the insistence on particularity and diversity is increasingly becoming a global discourse and traditional and local cultures are being affirmed globally due to the weakening of the nation-state, globalisation is also producing new hybrid identities (Barker 1999:42).

Both these tendencies can also be noted regarding the position of South African languages on the Internet. While the Internet has provided a vehicle for the affirmation of minority identities, it can also be seen to create a space for a new hybridity to develop. This development is however subject to several specific local determining conditions.

3. Local determining factors

3.1 Historical background

As was the case with other African languages and literatures (Gagiano 2000), the centuries of colonial rule in South Africa - of which apartheid, as a form of internal colonialism[4], was the most recent example - have also detrimentally affected linguistic development. During apartheid the country had two official languages, namely English and Afrikaans. Other languages were not afforded the same opportunities for growth and development. This in spite of the fact that approximately 70% of all South Africans have an indigenous African language as their mother tongue, whereas 25% have English or Afrikaans as their mother tongue (Kaschula & De Vries 2000). In the so-called homelands and the TBVC-countries (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei), one other African language was added to Afrikaans and English to serve as official languages, according to the region (Lubbe 2001:85).
Afrikaans was an empowered language under apartheid — it was assiduously promoted in order to acquire the high-status functions previously belonging exclusively to English (Alexander and Heugh 2001:20). However, Afrikaans has a peculiar double positioning vis-à-vis colonial discourse[5]. It was not only the language of the coloniser, but simultaneously also the language of the colonised. Because Afrikaans was appropriated by the white Afrikanerdom, the black[6] speakers of the language were thereby marginalised (Redelinghuis 1997:17,20), even though these speakers amounted to more than half of the total speakers of Afrikaans (Viljoen 1996:163). Afrikaans was also the language in which strong literary criticism against apartheid was offered. As will be shown later, the shift that has occurred in the position of Afrikaans within the South African language dispensation, provides an interesting case study for the opportunities the Internet creates.

3.2 South African languages after 1994

The South African language dispensation has changed quite radically with democratisation in 1994. The new constitution accorded equal official status to all eleven languages in South Africa on a national level. While it indicated that indigenous languages be developed and their limited rights be extended, it also stipulated that existing language rights may not be diminished (Van Rensburg et al. 1997, Lubbe 2001). For instrumental purposes, English has become the lingua franca in South African public life (Alidou and Mazrui 1999:106). While this means that the use of Afrikaans has been dramatically scaled down to occupy the position of a minority language, the other nine indigenous languages are at an even bigger disadvantage. Concerns have been raised that the Government does not do enough to empower previously marginalised indigenous languages. English dominates in institutions such as television, education, government, administration, courts of law and the Defence Force (Kamwangamalu quoted in Kaschula & De Vries 2000). In the workplace English, and to a lesser extent Afrikaans, still dominate as the medium of communication, threatening to further marginalise workers, of which 75 percent are not sufficiently proficient in English (Kajee 2000).

The scaling down of Afrikaans on government-sponsored television and the Anglicisation of companies and state institutions has led to an outcry amongst speakers of Afrikaans. That this debate about the perceived threat to the continued existence of Afrikaans has raged seemingly unabated since the initiation of the democratic negotiations around 1990, is due to the strong position of Afrikaans media companies, publishing houses, cultural and educational institutions. Not only in media such as newspapers and radio, but also in scholarly articles and journals and discussion forums at Afrikaans cultural festivals (which mushroomed in number and popularity), questions regarding the position of Afrikaans as a language and the identity of its speakers have been and still are hotly debated. Although this debate has given rise to conservative groupings receiving criticism for their alleged intent on using Afrikaans as an instrument to obtain political power and thereby adding to further ethnic polarisation[7], it has also displayed attempts to break away from Afrikaans’ association with apartheid and exclusive identities[8]. While previously marginalised speakers of Afrikaans now form an important part of the cultural and aesthetic production in the language, Afrikaans is also increasingly seen by its speakers as an indigenous African language, rather than a language of European origin (Kaschula & De Vries 2000) [9]. In this repositioning of Afrikaans, the Internet has also played a part.

3.2.1 Virtual communities as spaces of minority empowerment

A virtual community, of which there are tens of thousands on the Internet, could be understood as a “self-defined electronic network of interactive communication organised around a shared interest or purpose, although sometimes communication becomes the goal in itself” (Castells 2000:386). Virtual communities are not necessarily opposed to “real” communities, but operate according to their own rules and dynamics (Castells 2000:387). Castells (2000:390) notes further that groups considering themselves oppressed or marginalised in society are more likely to communicate on the Internet, because of the protection this medium affords them. Computer-based communication could create the opportunity to overturn power-relations existing in other forms of communication, he argues. Virtual communities are interpersonal social networks, transcending distance at low cost and combining the fast dissemination of mass media with the pervasiveness of personal communication (Castells 2000:389).

As far as virtual communities organised around linguistic and cultural issues are concerned, Afrikaans has made extensive use of the opportunities that new technologies[10] offer. A plethora of virtual communities in Afrikaans already exist, while the proliferation of web sites in Afrikaans or with Afrikaans as subject matter shows no sign of abating. Such is the extent of websites in Afrikaans that some websites have sprung up that serve as portals that link the user exclusively to other Afrikaans sites. One such site, www.dieknoop.co.za, claims to have links to more than a 1000 Afrikaans Internet pages, with a new one added every day. Among these, the website Litnet (www.mweb.co.za/litnet or www.litnet.co.za ) could serve as an interesting case study. It has shown a significant increase in popularity since it went online in 1999, from 16 000 page requests per month by August 1999 to 115 259 by August 2000, with an average estimated readership of 38 000 to 40 000 (Steyn 2001:122). Although its emphasis is on Afrikaans, Xhosa and English also have a presence, while the increasing use of Zulu and Sotho on the website has also been noted (Kaschula & De Vries 2000). Litnet’s features news and announcements of a cultural nature, contributions of fiction and poetry, book, theatre and film reviews, scholarly and polemic essays, regular columns, a page devoted to the language debate and a very popular letters page.

Not only does a website such as Litnet create the opportunity for an affirmation or re-iteration of existing cultural identities, it also sets the platform for the re-imagining of these identities. By serving as a contact zone for different South African languages and literatures, it creates the possibility for transcultural flow, going against the linguistic and literary hierarchy of apartheid which were aimed at preventing social contact between ethnic or racial groups (cf. Alexander and Heugh 2001:19-20, Smit and Van Wyk 2001:139). In so far as a site like Litnet has the potential of accommodating cultural and linguistic difference in this way, it could serve as a liminal space where the fixity of language and culture imposed through colonial discourses could be undermined. Even though Litnet displays a rare multilingualism, the balance is still tilted in favour of Afrikaans and English. However, by creating a multicultural space where different South African languages co-exist and contribute - albeit in an embryonical way - to the creation of a postcolonial hybridity, Litnet goes against Hall’s (2000:468) claim that virtual communities tend to be monolingual and culturally homogenous.

The strong position of Afrikaans on the Internet could at least partly be attributed to economics. Although Afrikaans could be seen as a minority language in postapartheid South Africa, its speakers still occupy the strongest economic position[11] in the country. While having been relegated to being a linguistic minority, Afrikaans speakers, generally speaking, are still an economic majority[12]. This means that access to the Internet is relatively easy compared to other language groups. The extent to which economics is an important factor in determining the presence of South African languages on the Internet becomes clear when the position of other South African minority languages are brought into focus.

3.2.2 The presence of South African languages other than Afrikaans and English on the Internet

To only celebrate the opportunities that the Internet has created for Afrikaans and taking that as representative of South African languages on the whole, would be presenting an overoptimistic picture of the situation. Examples of indigenous languages[13] on the Internet are hard to find. A recent guide to the Internet in Africa (Young 2001) lists only one Zulu site (www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/6570/ ) run by an English-speaking webmaster from Guildford, England); one Sesotho site ( www.cyberserv.co.za/users/~jako/sesotho.htm) with an introduction to Sesotho and two Xhosa sites ( mokennon.albion.edu/Xhosa.htm, a translator from English to Xhosa and vice versa, and a site (members.tripod.com/Sabelo/isiXhosa.htm ) which provides online lessons in Xhosa. These examples contrast starkly against ten listed Afrikaans sites, of which one, the already-mentioned Die Knoop, has more than a 1000 links. Some government sites have multilingual content (like the Department of Education (http://education.pwv.gov.za) , and the SABC’s site (www.sabcnews.co.za ) carries news in English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Sotho (Kaschula 2000). Some others, like the Xhosa Virtual Resource Network ( www.saol.co.za), ( www.womenatwork.co.za/membersdirectory/translationservice/insight.htm) or www.cyberserv.co.za/users/~jako/lang/xho.htm provide rudimentary Xhosa content, but are presented as translations for English-speakers who want to learn Xhosa or are just brief statements in Xhosa relating to missionary work done by Christians (www.greatcom.org/laws/xhosa) or Dianetics (http://xhosa.dianetics.org).
A small discussion forum, the Mzika_kaPhalo forum, was formed in May 2001, aimed at assisting translators who work in the English-Xhosa language pair. Four months after its initiation, the forum had only seven members (Makwetu 2001).

Although exact figures relating the number of websites in indigenous languages are hard to come by, searches on the Internet leads one to conclude that there is little available in these languages. Where these inquiries into these languages do produce results, it is mostly references to sites which provide information on these languages (in English) rather than information in indigenous languages. This seems to be a problem also concerning indigenous languages from other African countries (Smith 2000).

However, to search for websites which formally use one of the indigenous languages as their basis, might be the wrong approach in establishing the extent to which indigenous South African languages are present on the web. Because of the decentralisation of information and communication on the Internet, some critics have seen new media as not being mass media, in the sense that a limited number of messages are sent to a mass audience. Rather, the targeted audience have more of a choice as to the messages it receives, and the individual relationship between sender and receiver is thereby enhanced (Francoise Sabbah, quoted Castells 2000:368). Looking at South African websites, these individual relationships often result in languages being used in ways that are aimed at immediate comprehension or as passwords providing access to a specific virtual community. In the process formal linguistic boundaries are overstepped. Bulletin boards or guestbooks may carry messages mixing English (as well as English sociolects like hiphop-speak) with Afrikaans and African words, displaying a disregard for formal linguistic rules[17]. The Internet also provides for the celebration of an urban culture that undermines the linguistic or cultural notions which the dominant mainstream considers proper. Websites such as Urbantainment (http://lightning.prohosting.com/~africa99/urbantainment/index.shtml), www.blac.co.za and www.rage.co.za, although being mainly written in English, provide outlets for the dissemination of information about street culture. Urbantainment, for instance, describes itself as a “first step toward building a black virtual community in South Africa”. On these sites art forms such as graffiti, South African jazz and kwaito obtain wider currency. These forms portray an unique South Africanness, partly because of the innovative use of language. Kwaito, for instance, contains a mixture of South African languages and slang (cf. the kwaito star Arthur Mafokate’s comments on this in www.rage.co.za/issue29/kwaito.htm and also Stephens 2000:256). These sites would correspond with Wood’s (1997) observation that the Internet is best suited for the production of cultural meaning that is not fixed or static, but that comes into being through interconnection and exchange, a rhizomatic rather than a static conception of culture. “Searches for roots and foundations work but clumsily in cyberspace when compared to rhizomatic thinking,” Wood (1997) observes.

But probably the greatest barrier in the way of indigenous languages gaining a presence on the Internet remains the problem that has come to be known as the digital divide.

4. The digital divide

However optimistic one could be about the possibility of the Internet creating a counterflow of ideas and culture within the global communications network, access to the Internet is still marred by severe inequalities. It is firstly a global problem, seeing as the divide between rich and poor countries is evident from their connectivity or lack of it. Within South Africa itself, this divide is further related to the huge material inequalities still existing as a result of apartheid.

Based on data collected from various sources, Castells (2000:377) estimates that industrialised countries, with about 15 percent of the planet’s population, account for 88 percent of Internet users. On a whole, the continent of Africa does not share in the large-scale transformation that new communication technologies have brought about in the developed world. Although South Africa is in some ways an exception (Nyamnjoh 1999:42), the information superhighway is still passing Africa by. Computers and telephones are far from common in Africa. It has been observed that Manhattan has more telephone lines than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa and that in many African countries, telephone technology is of such a nature that it is faster and cheaper to travel than to make a telephone call (Nyamnjoh 1999:43). Despite the adoption of strategies[14] for information and communication in Africa, implementation in individual countries has been slow, due to economic, infrastructural, political and social constraints (Nyamnjoh 1999: 42-44). Although the Internet is continuing to grow in Africa (Jensen 2001), even if only among the elite institutions (Nyamnjoh 1999:44), the major cities (Jensen 2001) or educated, wealthy males (Robins 2000), the comparison between Africa and the Middle East on the one hand and the rest of the world on the other, is stark. The number of dialup Internet subscribers in Africa is around one million (according to Jensen 2001 the number of dial-up subscribers passed the one million mark in 2000). Because each connection supports between 3 to 5 users, it is estimated that Africa has about 4 million Internet users in total (Jensen 2001). An earlier figure (Castells 2000:377) puts the number of users at about 1.14 million in 1999. Whichever estimate is the closest to the actual figure, it is still drastically lower than the 102 million users in the US and Canada, over 40 million in Europe and 27 million in Asia and the Asian Pacific and 23.3 million in Latin America, and comparable only to the 0.88 million in the Middle East (Castells 2000:377). Not only is this divide causing some critics to suggest that one should no longer refer to First and Third Worlds but to “switched on” or “switched off” regions of the world, but also to warn that as connectivity patterns change our understanding of the geography and political economy of the world, entire parts of the world will be eliminated from cyberspace[15] (Winseck 2001:2).

Considered against the rest of the continent, South Africa is still relatively well off and could to a certain extent be seen as the exception to the rest of Africa’s connectivity backlog (Nyamnjoh 1999: 42). Of the estimated 4 million Internet users in Africa, only 1.5 million is outside of South Africa (Jensen 2001). South Africa has the second largest multinational ISP in Africa, M-Web (Africa Online being the largest) (Jensen 2001). Within South Africa itself, however, there are huge disparities regarding access to the Internet. These disparities, when analysed, might go some way in explaining the virtual absence of indigenous South African languages on the Internet.

Apart from global geographical inequalities, countries also display internal imbalances concerning Internet access. Even in highly developed countries such as the USA, connectivity is unevenly spread according to social, racial, gender, age and spatial factors (Castells 2000:377). This has led some commentators to conclude that the information marketplace will increase the gap between rich and poor countries and between rich and poor people, because of the leverage new technologies provide those who already have the information tools at their disposal (Dertouzos in Hall 2000:467). In South Africa this problem is compounded by the enormous class differences inherited from apartheid and which by and large still correlate with the old ethnic divides, which means that cultural capital is still largely distributed according to the ethnic hierarchy of pre-apartheid South Africa. In this regard, virtual South Africa still largely reflects actual South Africa (cf. Hall 2000:470), where the polarisations of the past is still far from effaced. The average South African Internet user earns more than R11 000 (approximately US$1300) a month and is white, while at the end of 1999 less than 1% of the country’s black population had access to the Internet (Smith 2000). Surveys have shown that while there is a measure of growth in the overall Internet access, black people are still at a significant disadvantage, while women in general are worse off than their male counterparts. In April 2000, 12,2% of white men had web access at home (an increase from 9% the previous year) and 12,8% had web access at work. The percentage of white women with web access at home was 10,6% (compared to 7,4% the year before) and at work 12,2% (up from 8,2% in 1999). However, in April 2000 only 0,2% of black South African men had access to the Internet at home (no increase from 1999) and 1,8% could access the web at work (an increase from 0,4% in 1999). Black women were worst off: Of 500 black women interviewed, only 1 (0.2%) had web access at home and 2 (0,4%) had web access at work. This figure shows no growth from the previous year (Webchek 2000).

Although figures vary according to different sources, they give a clear indication of the divisions that exist and that these divisions reflect negatively on the position of African languages speakers on the Internet. Even the above-mentioned Litnet, for all the work it does for undoing cultural hierarchies and bridging linguistic divides of the past, is only accessible to subscribers to the ISP M-Web[16].

There is, however, a realisation of the problems facing Internet access in South Africa and government, NGO’s and the private sector alike have gone some way in addressing them. This include the connection of schools to the Internet, where computer facilities are also serving the community. The government has already established 73 community-based telecentres, providing access to telephones, fax, email and internet (Thorne 2001) and the media company Naspers have erected three computer centres, two of which are in the rural towns of Calitzdorp and Carnarvon, where internet access is provided to school children (see Hall 2000:473 for further examples). Only recently (October 2001) a translation project (www.translate.org.za) was launched which aims to translate email-, web- and desktoptools into all the South African languages, in an attempt to make it easier for untutored computer users to gain access to digital technology by providing the basic software to them in their mother tongue. The student site www.gal.co.za has also announced that it now provides e-commerce facilities (selling academic books) in Zulu.

4. Conclusion
The challenge to provide African languages that were deliberately underdeveloped during apartheid (see Alexander and Heugh 2001:21) the chance to come into their own, is important from a socio-economic point of view, since the majority of South Africans at present do not have sufficient command of the high status languages Afrikaans and English to compete for prestigious career options (Alexander and Heugh 2001:23-24, see also Kajee 2000). For the Internet to contribute to this development, the digital divide needs to be overcome. The extent to which the Internet has provided a tool for Afrikaans speakers to reposition themselves within a changing linguistic landscape, indicates the potential the Internet has as a platform for linguistic minorities. Certain South African websites have also shown that the Internet can serve as a space for the construction of new hybrid identities and the overstepping of the imposed cultural borders of the past. However, before the Internet can really promote multilingualism and multiculturalism in South Africa, the severe inequalities that mark access to the medium need to be overcome, maybe through the sharing of resources between minority languages of which Afrikaans is economically in the strongest position. This is the challenge to face if the “new media” is to create something new rather than reinforce old divides.

[1] An earlier version of this chapter was presented as a paper at the international symposium “Text in Context: African languages between orality and scripturality”, University of Zurich, Switzerland, October 2001.

[2] The extent to which language is related to cultural frameworks is the subject of a wide-ranging debate between so-called linguistic nationalism and instrumental universalism. Whereas the first position maintains that different languages embody cultural knowledge systems in radically different ways, the second stress that pragmatic considerations should dictate the choice of language, because all languages share the most important functions of communication and are sufficiently malleable to be made to bear on specific experiences (see Alidou and Mazrui 1999). The position taken in this paper is that language is more than a means of communication, but is in stead closely linked to cultural identity and can become an important factor in cultural politics in postcolonial societies. This does however not ignore the fact that the adoption of English as a lingua franca in South Africa does have pragmatic advantages, nor that the appropriation and abrogation of a former colonial language also forms part of postcolonial processes. Nevertheless it is maintained that the empowerment of indigenous languages through new technologies could serve as a validation of cultural identities that have either been oppressed during apartheid, or are marginalised on a public sphere in the postapartheid era. The protests surrounding the scaling down of Afrikaans on a public level indicates that demands for the accommodation of cultural specificity in postapartheid South Africa can also not be ignored.

[3] The concern that the Internet might have an imperialising effect on non-English languages is not limited to the developed world. According to Nyamnjoh (1999:46), France is developing strategies to “protect French culture and influence from the world-wide proliferation of English as the language of the new communication technologies”.

[4] Apartheid was called Colonialism of a Special Type by the South African Communist Party (Visser 1997:79). For further discussion of the term internal colonialism to describe apartheid, see JanMohamed 1985:72, De Kock 1993:65, Ashcroft et al. 1994:83 and Wasserman 2000a:11.

[5] For further discussion of this double positioning, see Wasserman 2001.

[6] According to the racial differentiation of apartheid, these speakers would predominantly have been classified as “coloured”, but the term “black” was used by the signified themselves in order to homogenize the oppressed and in order to reject the categorization of apartheid (Willemse 1987:205, see also Smith et al. 1985) and is therefore also the term used here.

[7] For some of these conservative arguments, see Lubbe’s (2001:86) examples of Afrikaans being used as an instrument in the continuation of an exclusive Afrikaner nationalism. For critical responses highlighting the conservatism in some of the new language movements such as Praag (Pro Afrikaanse Aksiegroep) or criticism related to the role of Afrikaans in the minority politics of the Group of 63 , see respectively Kaschula & De Vries 2000 and the somewhat biased Steyn 2001:127, 130. For an argument outlining the importance of Afrikaans speakers not to mobilize themselves along ethnic lines but to form an alliance with other non-dominant indigenous languages, see Alexander 2001.

[8] For examples of the renegotiation of cultural identity in Afrikaans literature, see Wasserman 2000b and 2001.

[9] Approximately 5,8 million South Africans have Afrikaans as their mother tongue, which makes out 15,7% of the South African population. Afrikaans has the third most first language speakers in South Africa, after Zulu (21,61%) and Xhosa (17,44%). Approximately 9 million South Africans can speak and/or understand Afrikaans. 15 million people in total — 48% of the population - can therefore understand or speak Afrikaans (Van Rensburg et al. 1997:80-82). Only approximately 8,68% of South Africans have English as their mother tongue (Kaschula & De Vries 2000). Less than 25% of black South Africans understand English well enough to function fully in public life, although English is practically the only language used in important public domains (Webb and Kembo-Sure 2000:38).

[10] Apart from the Internet, Afrikaans has also made use of new technologies such as CD Roms (e.g. Verswêreld, a standard anthology of Afrikaans poetry) and online publishing (at www.contentlot.com).

[11] Almost half of the total amount of Afrikaans speakers (about 4,3 million in total) is white. Afrikaans speakers contributed R161,497 billion to the domestic spending in South Africa in 2000. That amounts to 32,3 % of the total domestic spending (Rossouw 2001), as opposed to 27,9% of spending by English speakers, 22,3% of Nguni (Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele and Swati) speakers and 17,6% of Sotho (Sotho, Pedi, Venda, Tswana and Tsonga) speakers (Du Toit 2000).

[12] Groups can be seen as minorities although they are numerically a majority, as South African blacks had been under apartheid (Loomba 1998:14). Similarly, one could speak of a group like Afrikaans speakers as an economic majority while being a cultural minority - although one should not lose sight of the fact that enormous class differences also exist within the Afrikaans community, also as a result of the inequalities inherited from apartheid. Languages should be considered majority or minority languages not on the basis of their number of speakers, but of the function and status attached to them (Webb and Kembo-Sure 2000:42).

[13] In this section of the paper, the term “indigenous languages” denotes official South African languages other than Afrikaans and English. In the rest of the paper Afrikaans is taken to be an indigenous South African language. In spite of its Dutch roots, Afrikaans is not strictly speaking an ex-colonial language. It arose from African soil at grassroots level, as soldiers, slaves and Khoikhoi herders in the process of acquiring the Dutch of the colonizers. Afrikaans shows several semantic, phonological and grammatical differences from Dutch, its vocabulary and pronunciation and intonation patterns contain a large amount of elements originating in Africa. It is not spoken in any significant way outside Africa, expresses an African frame of reference and could therefore be seen as an African language, even though it was appropriated by its white speakers during apartheid and its European roots emphasized (Webb and Kembo-Sure 2000:39-40). To the extent that the English spoken in South Africa also differs from Englishes spoken in other parts of the world, one would also be able to refer to these Englishes as Africanized or ex-colonial languages . In spite of the fact that English has been indigenised in South Africa, it can only be spoken well by less than a quarter of the black population (Webb and Kembo-Sure 2000:38-40).

[14] Such as the African Information Society Initiative launched by the UN Economic Commission For Africa in collaboration with the International Telecommunications Union, the International Development Research Centre and Unesco, and the policy documents adopted by the SA Government (see Hall 2000:465).

[15] The developed world’s claims to cyberspace sometimes resemble a colonialist arrogance: earlier this year it was reported (Thiel 2001:4) that an American businessman, Greg Paley from Seattle, registered the names of at least 31 Third World countries before they had access to the Internet, and asked the SA government $20 million dollars for access to the domain name South Africa.com.

[16] With the exception of users who access the Internet from a corporate network or from outside South Africa.

[17] The guestbook of a South African urban entertainment-website (Urbantainment, http://lightning.prohosting.com/~africa99/urbantainment/indec.shtml), for example, contains messages that read as follows (random examples):
“Peace goes out to that phat ass skwatta kamp crew holding it down in SA nahwhumsayin’ (…)” ;“all I can say is this site is 2 damn duidlik peace (…)”; “Awe ouens Kak duidelik en alles maar nou kan ’n man ’n gesignde copy van die nuwe CD kry?…”

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