so I'm no longer in London right now I'm
actually back in Portland right now
which is the town about 130 kilometers
away from a Sydney so of course I only
really needed one guest video but when I
saw this video submission I really
couldn't say no now this video was made
by the ever so phenomenal friend of
mythic and going through it it
definitely seems a bit familiar so for a
mythic please take it away
so the Republic of South Africa has 11
official languages there is a lot of
languages and even though the country is
roughly the size of Germany France and
the UK combined it only has a quarter of
the number of inhabitants and unlike
South Africa each of those highly
developed countries have only a singular
official language with the best token
recognition of minority languages South
Africa is at the same time highly
developed and abysmal poor so how does
it manage servicing all these required
language facilities well truth be told
man
not terrible but not that excessively
good either having to spend money and
time on translations of official and
legal documents on education even just
on things like road signs is a bit of a
drag on society but how did South Africa
end up in this situation and how could
they've made life easier for themselves
at an earlier stage according to South
Africans themselves let's find out so
how did the Republic of South Africa end
up in this situation well you probably
heard of this thing called apartheid
which basically meant that the white
minority wanted the country for
themselves but at the same time they
wanted to continue to depend on blacks
as a cheap labour force so they
basically wanted to have the cake and
eat it too of course that worked out
really well
but how did they even try to make this
work well using a nifty 3-step plan
phase 1 deny all blacks their South
African citizenship phase 2 divide and
rule first fragment the black majority
into tiny bits then create semi
independent homelands for each ethnicity
here blacks could live at close range
for commuting to work inside South
Africa and at the same time officially
reside outside of South Africa phase 3
profits South African whites consist of
two main groups based on native language
English and Afrikaans the letter derived
from Dutch an informer minority rule
South Africa this word therefore the
official languages however the black
majority spoke a whole range of
different languages natively to be able
to service both white minorities it was
decided in 1974 to split language
education for blacks into two forcing
one half to learn Afrikaans and that
didn't go down very well long story
short in 1994 apartheid was abolished
and South Africa became fully democratic
to honor the different language
communities having been oppressed for so
long official status was granted to
almost all of them so here we are now
but why does South Africa have so many
languages to begin with
[Music]
well Africa is generally pretty diverse
already when it comes to people's
cultures and languages
south africa on the other end is
actually pretty much comparable to
europe and that respects but where
european peoples have been grouped
together into several unifying
nation-states black South Africans have
remained fragmented up to this day and
what certainly didn't help was a swarm
of independent German French and English
missionaries back in the day
each translating the Bible into the
different tribal languages they
encounter this fragmentation was then
enshrined later by the apartheid
homeland so when the end of apartheid
was imminent the need for rebuilding the
country led some to revive ideas of
language harmonization language
harmonization is fusing several
languages together into a single
language this can be done by choosing
the most neutral dialects or by creating
a novel standard language altogether for
this to work the languages to be
harmonized must be number one closely
related and number two highly mutually
intelligible this works in many places
around the world like in Europe word
arose almost naturally with the
emergence of nation-states in South
Africa some people wanted to achieve
something similar black South African
scholar Jakob Zappa already suggested as
early as 1944 to harmonize South African
Bantu languages following the two main
language families new goony making up
Zulu Xhosa swati and de belem and su to
Tirana consisting of two Ana Betty and
Sue - among other dialects this was
followed up by other scholars suggesting
a regional language model as used in
Belgium Switzerland and
Canada South Africa would then end up
with just four official languages each
with their own region large metropolitan
areas would service all four languages
there will be a language region for
goony a language region for unified suto
and a language region for Afrikaans
English would be established as the
overarching national language ideas like
this are regularly brought up but just
as quickly shut down again given the
history of the country people are a
little sensitive when it comes to being
told what languages they have to learn
and there's of course the issue of
self-identification and linguistic
nationalism but ethnic pride aside are
there any technical hurdles for
harmonizing those languages let's take a
look at the suited to our languages one
important first step is making sure that
spelling rules are the same the second
step is selecting the most common or
universally understood words and
expressions to be included in the
harmonized language finally any
harmonized language should be put to the
test to see if it works at all and
that's exactly what I did in a 2009
study by Locati makélélé native speakers
of sapele setswana and sousou 2 were
tested for their understanding of texts
written in the respective language
varieties they were also asked to read a
text in unified suto the results the
students had little to no problems
reading and understanding the different
texts in other words these varieties
should probably be regarded as part of
the same language and a harmonized
variety seems to work fine for
well-educated young people in any case
the results may vary for goony languages
like Lhasa and Zulu but it could still
work after all
it does for languages that include much
greater variety like German or French so
will it eventually happen well
politicians would probably not want to
tackle this sensitive issue the most
likely thing to happen is English
eventually being declared the single
national language like they for example
did in Namibia already it seems like
many South Africans would actually
prefer that however this could mean that
all the other languages may eventually
disappear and that would be a shame had
South Africa's past been different and
had the country granted human rights for
all its inhabitants like happens in
Western countries it may have been a
different story check out my video
speculating on what could have happened
had apartheid never been implemented for
now back to canoe B's tears and Baba
[Music]
thank you so much friend emetic if you
want to see more of the stuff you can of
course do so through the end screen
buttons or through a link I've put in
the description that is it for this run
of the guest videos and thank you to
everyone who submitted their ideas and I
will of course be back with you as
always next Sunday