Department of African Languages

Mission and vision

We are committed to offering high quality courses and programmes that will equip our students with cutting-edge knowledge and make them prominent leaders and trail blazers in their respective areas of specialisation.

Our vision is to empower our students with language competencies and skills that will make them dynamic language practitioners and entrepreneurs, thus contributing to effective job-creation in South Africa.
 

Value Statement

We believe in:

• Excellence in Service Delivery:
• Value addition:  to improve the levels of knowledge and expertise of our students.
• We value all the aspects of the ubuntu concept such as integrity, honesty, communalism, etc.
• We value good governance which entails participatory democracy and we wish to train our students to be involved in departmental issues.  We believe that multilingualism can facilitate this process.
• Communication:  We believe in the important role of good communication in the fostering of healthy relationships between people.   We recognize the important role of language as a means of communication and we wish to train our students to be good communicators within their own communities and also at the cross-cultural level.
• We believe in mother-tongue instruction because language is without doubt the most important factor in the learning process for the transfer of knowledge and skills.   There certainly are benefits in the use of the mother-tongue as a medium of instruction.