From Left to Right: Senior Lecturer and Learning and Teaching Specialist Dr Mervyn Coetzee; Dean of the UWC Education Faculty, Professor Rajendran Govender, UWC Rector and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Robert Balfour; and, UWC Extraordinary Professor of Language Education, Professor Sivakumar Sivasubramaniam.The University of the Western Cape (UWC) marks this day and acknowledges its significance.
South Africa ranks third globally as the nation with the most official languages, having added South African Sign Language in 2023 as the 12th official language of the country.
The significance of the date of IMLD is to commemorate the murders of 5 students in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) on 21 February 1952 when they were killed and many others injured by police during a protest for Bengali to be officially recognised in that country.
Commemorations on the day have evolved and now mark challenges faced by endangered languages and multilingual communities worldwide.
United Nations (UN) statistics show that there are 8,324 languages in the world today, and many are at risk of disappearing due to globalisation and societal changes. In South Africa, the medium of instruction in Primary and High School classrooms and higher education lecture rooms has remained a contentious issue since the dawn of democracy.
UWC Senior Lecturer and Learning and Teaching Specialist Dr Mervyn Coetzee co-authored the book, Trauma, Injustice and Identity: Investigating an Egalitarian and Autoethnographic Approach to Analysing Students’ Personal Language Narratives, with his mentor, Prof Sivakumar Sivasubramaniam. The book, which was launched on the eve of IMLD, examines, in part, how for many students, when the language of instruction is their second language it can hamper their success.
At the book launch, UWC Rector and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Robert Balfour, said: “Finding the right words when you’re in an environment where the language being used is not your first, your second, or even your third language is absolutely part of the struggle for access to education. It’s not simply about absorbing what is being spoken around you.”
Prof Balfour was the previous Head of the School of Languages Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His research interests include applied linguistics, post-colonial literary criticism, and education. At the book launch, he said: “The languages that students bring to the classroom are actually resources for the learner. The languages that students bring might not be in your curricular but they are resources. When we ask ourselves why students sometimes struggle to feel like they belong in an institution, I think one answer has to do with how language is used or not used in that space. And we as educators have a responsibility to ask ourselves: Are we reinforcing these walls, or are we making efforts to break them down?”
The theme for IMLD 2025 is “Languages Matter!” which intends to highlight the urgent need for progress toward linguistic diversity and inclusivity as part of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
