Languages and Policy in Botswana

Botswana’s colonial and post-independence governments have for a long time neglected marginalized languages spoken in the country. This negligence has been done through exclusion where out of the 26+ languages in the country only Setswana and English are recognized in all official domains. In this chapter we argue that this glaring language practice has hitherto been taken to be a language policy in a country that has evident multilingualism. The chapter further argues that other languages are not regarded as a resource but as a problem. The point made in the chapter is that all languages should be assigned roles in the constitution to guard against dearth and death. We further outline ways in which marginalized languages could be included in one domain—education, and it is our belief that this would inform how the recently drafted language policy could be actualized for the benefit of learners who do not speak English and Setswana as mother tongue.