In celebration of International Mother-tongue Day, the Western Cape Youth Commission calls on young people to take pride in their mother-tongue and challenge the dominance of international languages such as English as the medium of communication in professional and community life.

Young people increasingly are in danger of loosing their cultural roots, values and mother-tongue through the impact of global media and telecommunication networks. As much as these consequences of the media revolution may be unintended, they still represent a very real situation.

It is therefore important that young people remain critical of our engagement with global media language and continuously seek alternative and creative ways to promote our uniquely African languages and cultures.

As much as young people need to be able to engage on an international level, such engagement cannot be at the expense of our own languages and identities.

The Commission also calls on cultural organisations that specialise in the promotion of local African languages to assist young people in this regard by:

• Creating opportunities and projects for young people to write books, establish websites, develop media programmes and other products, etc., in their mother-tongue
• Creating opportunities to practice and use mother-tongue languages
• Creating opportunities for young people to be introduced to other local African languages.

The Commission calls for institutions in the language and culture sector in our country to ensure that they support each other, and especially those language communities that do not as yet have strong institutions to protect and promote their languages.

A case in point would be the very strong Afrikaans language institutions that have the opportunity to extend their major contribution to language promotion in our country by partnering with other African languages in their promotion and protection.

In a bid to reflect this commitment, the Youth Commission has adopted the langauge policy of the Western Cape and is in the process of aquiring translation services to provide all communication to young people available in the offical languages of the province, namely Afrikaans, isiXhosa and English. Translation of the Commission's website is already in progress.

Enquiries:
Rudi Buys
Commissioner
Western Cape Youth Commission