This article situates itself in the context of proposed bi/multilingual higher education policy in post-apartheid South Africa. The discussion revolves around a descriptive analysis of language-user preferences regarding a bilingual (English–isiZulu) medium of education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). It provides a profound picture of particular reasons behind sentiments displayed by university constituents. Three issues are highlighted: 1) implications of the current policy for staff and students; 2) results of a survey of prevailing language choices of staff and students, probing the following salient factors of both groups: language-use patterns, isiZulu proficiency, language preferences, and awareness of language policy in higher education; and 3) conclusions, implications and plausible recommendations for future policy implementation plans at UKZN. The findings of this study may have serious ramifications for language policy planning, not only at UKZN but in higher education in South Africa in general.

This article seeks to provide a parsimonious generative account of the relationship between Zulu nouns and their prefixes, and between the singular and plural forms of nouns. It has been suggested that in the Bantu languages the latter relationship can best be described by assuming that nouns are marked for a feature gender, and that the feature class can be derived from the combination of the features gender and number. These claims lead to considerable redundancy if applied to a language like Zulu. A more parsimonious grammar can be achieved by assuming that Zulu nouns are lexically marked for class, and that plurals of count nouns, rather than being inflections, are regularly and productively derived from the singular.

The contribution discusses the work of the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN), initiated in 2001 by the president of the Republic of Mali and officially institutionalised in 2006 as a special office of the African Union. It starts off with a discussion of a number of issues relevant to language planning in Africa: the need to accept that African languages and the languages imposed on African communities in the colonial period have to co-exist; the potential of language to be used to serve elite interests; the importance of counter-hegemonic strategies; the threat posed to African languages by urban vernaculars; and the necessity of viewing language planning as an integral part of social and economic planning. Hereafter, the origin, objectives and structures of ACALAN are discussed. The article ends with an overview of ACALAN's core projects and initiatives, asking what the likelihood is that ACALAN will succeed if many similar initiatives have failed.

This article offers an analysis of the use of language on the websites of Dutch and Flemish small-scale development organisations active in The Gambia. The scope of this research is the websites of 66 organisations found through the hyperlink page http://gambia-hulporganisaties.startpagina.nl. The texts on the websites form a small corpus of around 375 000 words. Methodologically, a discourse-analytical perspective is assumed, heuristically assisted by corpus linguistic software. Thus, the texts are analysed simultaneously from a macro and micro-level: large-scale lexical patterns are combined with smaller-scale, contextualised, individual chunks of text. After a brief outline of the projects’ roots in tourism through self-reported histories of involvement and a cursory review of the literature on meanings and functions of diminutives in Dutch and other languages, the role of diminutives in the representation of the Third- World Other is explored. It is argued that diminutives in this context are used in an ambivalent way: diminutives express a sense of sympathy and at the same time reveal a derogative tone in descriptions of the Gambian side of the projects.

Despite an ongoing debate about the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of feedback on student writing, the practice prevails in educational settings. Louw (2006) hypothesises that the concept of feedback is sound, but the practice needs refinement. One such attempt is standardising written feedback on student writing. This article reports on an experiment which tested the relative effectiveness of normal feedback techniques against a standardised method of providing feedback. The aim was to determine which technique was more effective when students had to revise texts based on the feedback. The results indicate that the standardisation of feedback solves certain problems associated with feedback on student writing, but it also highlights certain underlying problems with regard to teacher focus, learner attitude and learner focus.

This article sets out some considerations for a study of the translation of children's literature in the South African educational context. It briefly focuses on the uses of children's books, particularly in terms of education, before proceeding to some of the key issues that have shaped academic discourse surrounding the translation of children's literature and a brief overview of available research, focusing particularly on South Africa. This is followed by some considerations and suggestions for the construction of a theoretical framework from within which to approach the study of the translation of children's literature in the South African educational context. A comprehensive bibliography is supplied, with the intention of providing an overview of relevant research.

The focus of this article is on the history and continued relevance of theory relating to political and power relations inherent in response to student writing and student perceptions of these relationships. The article notes the vast discrepancy between South African students studying in the distance-teaching context and the American classroom context in which much of the research in the field has been conducted to date. As a result of the distance-teaching context, response to student writing is restricted in this article to students’ perceptions of written feedback given by lecturers to writing they submitted for assignments. The perceptions of first-year University of South Africa students, registered for an English for Specific Purposes module, were elicited by means of a questionnaire. This shows the degree to which students perceive lecturers to be adopting a judging rather than a facilitative role. Tentative solutions to address the problem of unequal power relations are suggested. The aim is to move towards greater collaboration and sharing of power rather than an abdication of power by the teacher.

This article examines the war names used by the guerrillas in the Zimbabwean civil war (1966–1979). It is based on a larger sociolinguistic study dealing with the onomastic and pragmatic significance of these names. The war name was embedded in the history of resistance. Each name can be seen as a text with a long story about a war. The identity of the fighter was part of a wider social discourse that questioned the status quo and explored new political, social and cultural identities. This article focuses on the subcategory of martial names and examines the way in which these names were used to conceal the identity of the bearer and to create a new identity. Renaming became a process of repossession of political and cultural space, an aggressive engagement with the enemy.

South Africa is anecdotally known for its complex system of speech varieties correlating with variables such as ethnicity, first language, class and education. These intuitions (e.g. Lass 1990) require further investigation, especially in the context of a changing South Africa where language variety plays a key role in identifying social, economic and ethnic group membership. Thus, in this research, the extent to which these variables play a role in variety is explored using a corpus approach (the nature of class and race in the corpus is discussed more fully later in the article). The corpus project, focusing primarily on accent, has been undertaken by members of the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Rhodes University in South Africa, collaborating with staff from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. A corpus (the first of its kind) is being compiled, comprising the speech of educated, white, mother-tongue speakers of South African English (as distinct from Afrikaans English, Indian English, and the second language (L2) varieties of English used by speakers of indigenous African languages), and data collection is well under way. This short article aims to describe the aims of the project, and the methodological approach which underpins it, as well as to highlight some of the more problematic aspects of the research.