The language debate is yielding an interesting discourse.

The debate in Parliament has elevated the equality of indigenous languages to a point of visible equality before the law. The first sign of a society committed to its freedom comes when it demands the rights of authentic self-imagination. Political and economic domination is exerted through cultural influence. 

The extent to which a society can ideate itself out of any situation lies in limitations imposed by the language in which it accesses the knowledge it requires to develop. Through language, humanity has been able to demonstrate that no universal human perspective exists.  Language is therefore the prism through which humans experience (their) reality 

It is not only a vocabulary or grammar, in a linguistic sense, that defines the competitiveness of a society, but the grammar of development and the language it is expressed with that sets the bar at which competitiveness can start. Almost every time second or third-language-speaking leaders appear cognitively challenged, they would have volunteered to be strangers to their original ideas by choosing to express themselves in a less proficient language. 

One of the most gallant anti-colonial struggles, especially about socio-cultural self-emancipation, has been the one waged by Afrikaners as an ethnic or tribal group against British domination. Their perception of Afrikaans's standing in the world defines how they see their relative importance as a distinct ethnic group. With an acquired nativity in Africa over the years, Afrikaners have been able to construct an elite position of Afrikaans as a language of science, commerce, jurisprudence, technology, and dominance (where feasible). 

Even without a monarchy and a nation-state to cohere around and have a unilingual hegemony, Afrikaners were able to create a virtual aristocracy and an educated class with which the Afrikaans syntax could be developed. In almost all sectors of RSA's economic and commercial life, it has an algorithmic presence that requires less to no enforcement of its recognition. 

History records that this process took Afrikaners less than 150 years to reach the level it is now. With the window of 84 years from the adoption of the 1910 Constitution until 1994, Afrikaans became a language that defined the civil service, led a significant part of RSA's industrial revolution, transplanted a heart, built the longest kilometre rail infrastructure outside Europe, created a behemoth that ESKOM was and still is in the Southern Hemisphere, facilitated a mining industry and notably the coal mining sector, and many other feats including a arms and defence industry which is still globally competitive. It is this heritage of Afrikaans whose resilience exudes power and hegemony only discountable by the recklessness of its founding fathers when they made racism the basis of their social power structure. 

The recklessness was at some point in history so brazen that a decision was made to impose it as a medium of instruction in all South African schools, notwithstanding the growing rejection of apartheid, with its formalisation by most Afrikaner heads of the executive. The lived political experience of the 'nie-blankes-nie' got packaged with it as an antithesis of certain cultural aspects of the freedoms sought. A condition that has favoured English over Afrikaans, despite the global evidence of British colonialism as the source of indigenous torment. The reputation costs of between 1948 and 1976 recklessness shrunk Afrikaans's development which was otherwise organically growing. 

When the debate on the various budget votes, including the President's opening of the 7th Administration entered the language drama we all observed, the power and significance of language was foregrounded as a critical aspect of national unity. It was an interesting contradiction to observe second and third-language English speakers stopping Parliamentary proceedings for almost 3-5 minutes demanding the restoration of translation services in a language they could understand. On the other hand, the leader of the FF Plus was arguing that the expression of opinion in Afrikaans as a display of courage and leadership in decolonising South Africa. To second and third-language English speakers, standing up against Afrikaans could have also meant the same resentment the leader of the FF Plus and Minister of 'Korrektiewe Dienste, Pieter Groenewald had against the preferring of English over Afrikaans. 

The drama in Parliament where South Africa saw the bold use of isiNdebele, Xitsonga, Zulu, and other languages to induct the new GNU-Parliament presiding officers to a level where the Dean of Parliament became a close-to-the-ear interpreter was a dimension of the salient unity issues that became foregrounded. The MK dynamic in Parliament, with a profoundly pro-redefinition of the role of traditional leaders in the architecture of the democratic and constitutional order, might be the stirrings of a cultural revolution still to be expressed in its fullest. 

The demand for recognition of indigenous languages, by extension cultural, recognition, and how it played itself on national media screens and platforms, is a manifestation of the correctness of the decision to follow up the establishment of the GNU with a National Dialogue. While the last 35 years of nation-building through reconciliation and recognition of past injustices have moved South Africa further than where it was, there is a compelling case to argue that matters are arising in the economic and cultural order. All pockets of the 'marginalised' need some kind of institutionalized voice to ensure that their interests are heard, that they are respected and that they have some share of autonomy in national decisions. 

These demands of cultural recognition, euphemistically categorised identity politics, are growing into a large portion of the social compact to be threaded out of the National Dialogue. The depth of resentments and impositions which characterised the BELA public discourse, and many other language recognition debates have exposed how the private that has grown public in education has become a new terrain of social compacting. In the admission contracts to private education institutions…the parents cannot separate themselves from the objectives of being private; in accepting command over those in their private custody, private education providers take command over the socialisation of society and by extension the people. Plausible as the argument that societal choice is between free markets and state control is, the brute truth is that society is progressively getting socialised under a third thing entirely: private government.

The rants of bringing to the glare of the public the red overalls, workwear, domestic worker regalia, and generally persons whose wisdom can only be expressed in their first language is a pictorial of a philosophy of protest to what the picture in Parliament has not been dealing withu. At every opportunity the song 'my father was a garden boy and my mother was a kitchen girl' is sung, the melodic unity always communicates the outstanding matters that the national dialogue has to deal with.  How wide the representation in the National Dialogue process will define the grammar and vocabulary of the language it ultimately adopts to communicate its message to South Africans; metaphorically speaking. By Voorbat.