Afrikaans
‘It’s absolutely ludicrous’: Traveler up in arms after being forced to take Ryanair’s Afrikaans-language test to fly
Dinesh Joseph, who is a South African-born leadership and management trainer based in London, was recently on vacation and was one of the people forced to take the test before boarding his flight from the Canary Islands back to the UK. He described the experience to The World’s host Marco Werman.
Can you create a national anthem from a mashup? Here’s why South Africa did it
When South Africa ended apartheid and held free elections nearly 20 years ago, it needed a song that would heal the rift created by segregation. Its choice, the country’s new national anthem, is part-hymn, part-march, and all mashup. Instead of rejecting the past, it embraced both parts of it.
New Roles for Old Languages in South Africa
Linguist Mark Turin reports from South Africa, whose post-Apartheid constitution designates eleven languages as official. English is more popular than ever, Afrikaans is re-inventing itself, while the government’s efforts to raise the status of languages like Xhosa and Zulu have succeeded– up to a point.