The Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB) has raised concern over reports of people facing discrimination and intimidation based on the language they speak, amid ongoing tensions around undocumented migration.
PanSALB stressed that while the issue of undocumented migrants needed to be urgently addressed, no one should be subjected to suspicion, discrimination or violence because of the language they spoke or the accent they carried.
CEO Dr Keaobaka Seshoka says language was not evidence of nationality in Africa and that using accents to test immigration status was deeply problematic.
“PanSALB has noted with concern reports of people being questioned, intimidated and treated with suspicion because of their accents, also because of their pronunciation, vocabulary and in particular variety of the African languages that they speak. This is deeply problematic because as PanSALB we indicate that an accent is not an identity document. The way a person speaks cannot be used as reliable proof of citizenship, nationality or immigration status,” Seshoka says.
She says some incidents that had come to PanSALB’s attention involved people being asked to pronounce specific words or identify objects to demonstrate their knowledge of South African languages as a test of nationality.
Seshoka notes that many languages in South Africa were shared across borders and that regional varieties of the same language could sound markedly different from one another.
“Sesotho spoken in QwaQwa may sound different from Sesotho spoken in Gauteng and the Free State, and isiXhosa spoken in the Eastern Cape is different from isiXhosa spoken in the Western Cape. We need to resist making assumptions. A different accent does not automatically mean that a person is a foreigner or illegally here, and being a foreign national does not mean that a person is undocumented,” Seshoka explains.
She says immigration status must be determined through lawful documentation and official verification processes, and that only authorised law enforcement and immigration officials had the legal mandate to verify a person’s status.
“Documents should be verified by lawful authorities, and accents must never be criminalised,” Seshoka says.
PanSALB said it was pursuing structured engagements with relevant government departments to address linguistic profiling and planned to run language awareness campaigns, linguistic human rights campaigns, media engagements and public dialogues to promote understanding of multilingualism and cross-border language communities.
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