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Theodorus du Plessis
The Xhariep District is the largest district municipality of the Free State Province of South Africa, covering 26% of the total land surface of this province. It comprises three local municipalities, namely Letsemeng, Kopanong and Mohokare and contains a total of 17 towns. The District is a multilingual area, with Afrikaans (37.1%) and Sotho (37.1%) as the two predominant home languages, followed by Xhosa (19.9%) as the third most prevalent home language. The draft language policy of the Xhariep partly acknowledges this demographic distribution of the languages. In terms of this policy, Afrikaans and Sotho are two of the official languages of the Xhariep District Municipality. English, which is the home language of less than 1% of the Xhariep population, is recognised as the third official language of the Municipality. In the interim, without a formal new language policy, the communities of the area have come up with their own language initiatives. This article presents an analysis of such micro-language planning initiatives at the community level. Language-related problems and the needs of the community are identified, along with the types of intervention that exist at the community level in order to deal with these problems. The investigation is based on an analysis of ethnographic data, collected in a subregion of the Kopanong Municipality during 2008 and 2009, concerning the deployment of a new language policy in the area since 1994.
