{"id":590518,"date":"2022-05-26T10:28:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-26T08:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=590518"},"modified":"2022-05-26T10:28:00","modified_gmt":"2022-05-26T08:28:00","slug":"south-africa-to-get-12th-official-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/590518\/south-africa-to-get-12th-official-language\/","title":{"rendered":"South Africa to get 12th official language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>President Cyril Ramaphosa&#8217;s cabinet has approved the Constitutional Eighteenth Amendment Bill for public comment, which will give recognition to South African Sign Language as the 12th official language of the country.<\/p>\n<p>This comes after the Department of Basic Education announced that it will <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/590494\/4-new-language-options-coming-to-schools-in-south-africa\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">incorporate sign language<\/a><\/strong> as an option in the school curriculum in its annual budget speech this month.<\/p>\n<p>South African Sign Language (SASL) has been mooted as an official language for a number of years, with a parliament committee proposing its adoption in 2020. While the amendment bill has not been published at the time of writing, it is set to include an amendment of Section 6 of the Constitution and the National Official Languages, recognising SASL as the 12th official language.<\/p>\n<p>According to the <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.westerncape.gov.za\/assets\/departments\/cultural-affairs-sport\/some_basic_facts_about_sign_language_2.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Western Cape government<\/a><\/strong>, South African Sign Language has its own grammatical structure independent of any spoken\/written language such as English, Zulu, and Xhosa.<\/p>\n<p>The majority of deaf people (95.6%) are born to hearing parents and therefore do not acquire SASL as a mother tongue. Instead, they acquire SASL at school from peers and SASL is the first language of the majority of South African Deaf children.<\/p>\n<p>SASL, despite regional differences and variations, has the same grammatical structure countrywide. However, there is not a one-to-one relationship between SASL and English.<\/p>\n<p>One sign may be translated into English by more than one word, such as a phrase or a sentence. Likewise, an English word may be represented by more than one sign.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Read: <a href=\"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/590494\/4-new-language-options-coming-to-schools-in-south-africa\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">4 new language options coming to schools in South Africa<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>President Cyril Ramaphosa&#8217;s cabinet has approved the Constitutional Eighteenth Amendment Bill for public comment, which will give recognition to a 12th official language for the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":374004,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-590518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590518"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":590538,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590518\/revisions\/590538"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}