The Honours, Masters and PhD programmes are open and available to speakers of all African languages, and this move is seen as a growth node for the Department and for the University. The Department is promoting the use of indigenous languages at UWC. This need to promote multilingualism is in line with Section 6 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, which recognises twelve official languages, which includes the nine previously marginalised indigenous African Languages and the South African Sign Language (SASL) and the previously recognised English and Afrikaans languages.
The recognition and promotion of multilingualism, multiculturalism and multilingual pedagogies is also in line with the requirements of the Ministry of Higher Education’s call for multilingualism to be further entrenched at South African institutions of higher learning. There is a call not only to promote and improve the status of African Languages, but also to make use of them as media of instruction and access to disciplinary knowledge.
The following modules are offered for the Honours programme and students are to select three modules with Research Essay as the fourth and compulsory module:
- Theoretical Linguistics
- Translation studies
- Sociolinguistics
- Onomastics
- Media and Performance Arts Studies
- Classical and Contemporary Literature
- Research Essay (Compulsory)
- Method of Second Language Acquisition
- Forensic Linguistics
- Linguistic Landscapes
