After the rule of apartheid ended in 1994, the new government of the Republic of South Africa made a substantial change in language policy by giving an official status to eleven languages spoken in the country. Besides English and Afrikaans, nine more indigenous African Bantu languages were officially recognised. Such an extensive multilingual policy is unique in the world and although very progressive, presents a serious challenge to the system of education. The article touches upon the linguistic situation in the Republic of South Africa, the distribution and popularity of various languages and the topic of how the new policy has been implemented in the sector of education.
The article discusses greetings and farewells of a typical conversation in two Bantu languages: Swahili and Zulu. The conversation usually comprises the greeting followed by the enquiry about each other’s well-being, the actual conversation, and then the parting farewell. The article outlines the importance of nonverbal, sociolinguistic, and situational factors of the salutation. The objectives of the paper are to explore the feasibility of considering the salutation in Bantu languages as being uniform, to determine some common trends in the salutation, and to discuss the aspects that may have an impact on the form of the salutation, in languages in general and in Swahili and Zulu in particular.
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