Judges and court interpreters’ experiences of multilingualism in South African courts

Abstract

We do not define language planning as an idealistic and exclusively linguistic activity but as a political and administrative activity for solving language problems in society (Cooper, 1989:30).Language planning is often undertaken on a large scale at national level, a function usually undertaken by government (Baldauf, 2004:1).The situation presents at what Alexander (2002) terms the "linguistic fault line". Kaschula (2016:208) explains the context in which the 'linguistic fault line' has been created:There remains little evidence of a normalised, integrated, transformed, multilingual society, at least from a linguistic point of view. Instead, what exists now is a 'linguistic fault line' which divides the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' into a three-tier