Language and Identity.... Best friends or Enemies?

Identity is a complex word that describes a person’s “self- title” or “lifetime personality”. One day, the group and I attended a community engagement activity at the University of Johannesburg. This activity entailed pairing up with a student from the University and spending the entire day with them, discussing various subject matters such as, culture and politics. I was fortunate enough to have, not only one, but two partners that day. Their names were Moremi and Bonginkosi. The questions never stopped that day touching on various subject matters ranging from things like religion all the way to the socks that I had been wearing. Various political questions came about and several stereotypes were soon broken as we got to know each other in more detail. It wasn’t until much later that I brought about the question of identity and asked them how many languages each of them spoke. Moremi, impressively, knew how to speak six different languages, while Bonginkosi only knew how to speak three different languages. This led me to ask if the lack in languages Bonginkosi knew set a sort of linguistic barrier between him and certain parts of his community. Bonginkosi explained to me that the part of South Africa he comes from is very rural and it is because of this that so few languages are required to communicate with his fellow townspeople. Moremi comes from the city which is way more linguistically diverse than the rural parts of South Africa, requiring him to know many more languages just to get around his community. This aspect of language and location creates a sort of linguistic identity for my two new friends and is a very huge part of their identity in relation to a national level.

When we arrived in Cape Town many days later in the trip, my friends and I met a couple of German South Africans. They talked to us about how they are always mistaken for Afrikaners and how German South Africans are considered a minority. Their heritage had a colossal role in affecting their national identity. These men also claimed to have had very little in common with most South Africans and how there is a mammoth language barrier between them and most of South Africa. Therefore, their heritage had a major role in affecting their linguistic identity separating them from a common majority of South Africans.

~Kory