When home tongues clash with classroom words

SA’s official African languages mask dozens of dialects, affecting millions, especially in rural areas

- Mohale Manyama and Rod Amner

In the dim glow of a fireside in Ga-Kgapane, Limpopo, a small boy recites Khelobedu proverbs to his grandmother, his voice weaving tales of rain queens and resilient harvests. “Khelobedu akhe rowane kheya reta,” he says (“Our language praises, not curses.”)

Yet the next morning, as he steps into his primary school, all his Foundation Phase textbooks and readers are in Sepedi, a close but foreign cousin, leaving him lost in translation. Required to do written and oral tests in Sepedi, this bright child’s light is slowly dimming. He is one of thousands of Khelobedu-speaking learners grappling with a system that erases their language from the start.

South Africa’s official African languages mask dozens of dialects, affecting millions, especially in rural areas. Khelobedu, spoken by over a million people in Limpopo’s Mopani District, is formally classified as a Northern Sotho dialect. Balobedu children are forced to learn in Sepedi despite phonetic clashes — “khe” versus “se” — and key differences in vocabulary and structure.

The crisis in numbers

These under-researched disparities may explain anomalies in the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). African language learners perform worse on “home” language tests than those taking the test in English.

The PIRLS data reveal that Grade 4 learners taking the test in Sepedi (including Khelobedu speakers) scored the second-lowest in the country, with an average of 216, well below the Low International Benchmark of 400. This means less than 5% of Sepedi learners could read for meaning.

For dialect speakers like those in Khelobedu, the crisis is amplified. One critical study found that when the African language of the test did not match learners’ home language, results were worse, substantially impacting reading comprehension.