Vive la difference!?Language challenges in South Africa

The so‐called ‘New South Africa’ has a complex and idealistic language policy which provides for the use of 11 official languages. While this policy attempts to recognise the linguistic diversity within the country, it also poses greater challenges, since several of these languages have not yet been developed for use in a wide variety of discourse domains. Furthermore, the process of development is complicated by negative attitudes which hold that indigenous languages are somehow ‘inferior’ to English and other Western languages. The paper explores the role that Language Awareness and Critical Language Awareness components could play in addressing these challenges as part of a teacher education curriculum.