Namibia in its thirties: Reviewing the choice of English as sole official language

Abstract

Namibia is a linguistically diverse country that attained independence in 1990. One of the most significant policy decisions at the time was to remove Afrikaans as one of the official languages, recognising English only, a monolingual official language policy that ignored the multilingual realities of the new country. The document justifying this decision was written a decade earlier and prepared by the United Nations Institute for Namibia based on eight criteria. In this paper, we critically review these criteria: unity, acceptability, familiarity, feasibility, science and technology, pan-Africanism, wider communication, and United Nations. We argue that the choice of these criteria, and the “value” attributed to European languages, compared with that of Namibian languages, were biased in a way to support the monolingual English policy. We conclude with an invitation to Namibian officials at all levels of government and local community organisations to engage in conversations to promote multilingualism more formally.