As the University of the Free State (UFS) marks International Mother Language Day, Prof Nomalungelo Ngubane – Director of the Academy for Multilingualism at the UFS – encourages the larger UFS community to celebrate and use their mother languages to strengthen their cultural pride and sense of belonging at the institution.
Engaging the youth
The theme under which the day is being observed this year is Youth Voices on Multilingual Education. Therefore, Prof Ngubane highlighted that it is important to engage young people in the promotion and preservation of mother tongues, specifically in Africa. In fact, she explained: “Many African languages have historically been under-documented in digital spaces and without a digital presence, these languages run the risk of reduced visibility and intergenerational use.” To engage young people in this endeavour, she said the Academy for Multilingualism, in collaboration with the Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital Futures (ICDF), the UFS Library, and the South African Centre for Digital Resources (SADiLaR), is currently promoting the digital footprints of indigenous African languages through archiving and publishing written stories, terminologies, essays, and books in African languages on several digital platforms.
Making multilingual education accessible
According to Prof Ngubane – in recent years, the Academy for Multilingualism has been working on the development of Sesotho terminology in disciplines such as accounting, law, mathematics, psychology, and economics, among others. In addition, the academy has made Afrikaans terminology accessible to UFS students since 2024, and has also, through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), made isiZulu terminology accessible. All these efforts, “to promote access and success among students whose native language is not English”, said Prof Ngubane. Furthermore, she indicated that the academy is making sure that South African Sign Language (SASL) is not left behind in terms of advancement as an academic language.
Prof Ngubane highlights that the benefit of this commitment to multilingualism is that mother languages, when used in academic spaces such as tutorials, support comprehension, participation, critical thinking, and active engagement among students. Consequently, the use of mother tongues also enhances multilingualism, social cohesion, and preservation of local and global indigenous languages. As such, she credits the success of these initiatives to collaboration with departments in and beyond the UFS.
Although strides have been made in the promotion and preservation of mother languages specifically within the UFS, Prof Ngubane indicates that a one-day commemoration to embrace and embed mother tongues as tools for accessing and producing knowledge, and the fact that teaching and learning and research are predominantly in English, are challenges to the goal of promoting and preserving mother languages. She therefore calls for an “investment in multilingual pedagogies for inclusivity, diversity, social justice, and transformation.”