Student Attitudes Towards Their Mother Tongues at South African Universities

In a multilingual context, such as the University of Venda where students come from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the important role of language is beyond debate. Language attitude refers to the positive or negative emotions experienced by people when they are faced with a choice between languages in a variety of situations, or when learning a language. This study examines undergraduate university students’ attitudes towards their mother tongue, whether positive or negative. The two research instruments used to collect data were observation and interviews. Data were collected in a multilingual setting at the University of Venda where five official indigenous South African languages—Northern Sotho, siSwati, isiNdebele, Tshivenda and Xitsonga—and English, also an official language, are spoken by the students. The findings suggest first, that student attitudes and preferences are positive towards using English in all their important educational and social communications, and second, that there is a low level of mother tongue proficiency, which affects the students’ academic performance since the mother tongue influences the acquisition of the second language (English). It is anticipated that this study will inform policy formulation in institutions of higher learning.