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South Africa's constitutional commitment to multilingualism has not produced a genuinely multilingual society. Instead, it has coincided with the growing dominance of English across government, education, the courts, and public life.

This contradiction was inadvertently highlighted this week by Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, Andries Nel, who argued that indigenous African languages needed to be integrated into South Africa's legal system to make justice more accessible.

Speaking at the University of Mpumalanga this week, Nel said that people had to rely on interpreters in many cases. Nel said that the Department of Justice employed 1 900 interpreters of various languages across the country, but that translation services could not substitute for the full use of indigenous languages within the legal system.

"Thirty years after the adoption of the Constitution, our task is not merely to praise its multilingual promise. It is to build the institutions through which that promise can speak. Let us ensure that every language of our people can become a language not only in which justice is heard, but through which justice is imagined, reasoned, and made."

[Readers will notice the logical impossibility of what Nel proposes, that all 12 languages be utilised simultaneously in the country’s court system without the need for interpreters – a very useful insight into the complete confusion that exists in the minds of many of the government’s most senior leaders. The alternative, of course, is that there will be, for example, Zulu courts for Zulu people, but that will only work in the event that the victim and perpetrator, the prosecutor, the defence, and the judge are of the same ethnic and language background – an extreme throwback to the most extreme manifestation of segregation.]

Nel proposed partnerships between the University of Mpumalanga, the South African Judicial Education Institute, and the Brigitte Mabandla Justice College to develop legal terminology in indigenous languages, improve interpreter training, and expand access to justice.

His comments touch on a much broader question about South Africa's language policy.

The late sociologist Lawrence Schlemmer had already argued in the 1990s that South Africa's decision to recognise many official languages would not preserve linguistic diversity. Instead, he believed it would ultimately establish English as the country's single practical lingua franca, which is what has effectively happened in the country.

His reasoning was straightforward. Once government recognised numerous official languages, it became impractical to conduct administration, higher education, legislation, and commerce equally in all of them. Rather than elevating every language, institutions would increasingly default to the one language already widely understood across linguistic communities: English.

Three decades later, that prediction has largely come to pass.

English overwhelmingly dominates Parliament, the courts, government departments, universities, and the corporate sector. National political leaders almost invariably address the country in English, including many who advocate strongly for African cultural identity.

Afrikaans, once the only other language with a substantial institutional footprint, has steadily retreated from public life. It has largely disappeared from the public service, historically Afrikaans universities have become predominantly English, and the number of Afrikaans schools has declined. Remaining Afrikaans institutions have frequently faced pressure to adopt English or dual medium instruction.

Indigenous African languages have not filled that space.

There is a certain contradiction in that. Data from Statistics South Africa show that fewer than 10.0% of South Africans report English as their home language. What that means is there's a disconnect between the domestic lives of South Africans and what happens in professional spaces and the business community.

Outside the early years of primary education, it remains extremely difficult to complete schooling in an indigenous African language. Universities regularly promote multilingualism as an institutional value, but degree programmes taught through African languages remain exceptionally rare. Academic research produced in these languages is unusual enough to attract national media attention when it occurs.

Even within the justice system, where constitutional language rights are especially important, English remains the dominant language of legal reasoning, legislation, judgements, and legal education. Interpreters allow proceedings to be understood, but they do not make African languages the languages of law.