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A large South African university has abandoned Afrikaans as the official language for the benefit of English.
The University of Pretoria told the BBC that she needed to "transform the culture" to make it "truly South African".
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English is the language of choice in South Africa.
The politics of the Afrikaans language has always been used to exclude black learners in a country where racism remains deeply entrenched 25 years after the end of the white minority's rule.
The word apartheid, which is now internationalized and appears in the Oxford Dictionary, is actually an Afrikaans word.
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The language is still spoken by millions of people, but it is hoped that this decision will allow the many millions of people who do not speak it to feel welcome in one of the best academic institutions in the country.
Alienating
On Twitter, black and non-Afrikaans students discussed the new politics, many of them sharing the humiliating and alienating treatment they claim to have been submitted to the University of Pretoria.
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One of them said that black students had been intentionally humiliated by lecturers speaking Afrikaans.
Another recalls that language was a struggle for them as a 17-year-old black teenager from a township.
And another former student said that lecturers had refused to speak English, telling students, "If you do not understand, this is not my problem."
Asked about the testimony, Pretoria University spokesman Rikus Delport told the BBC: "I'm sure there are incidents.
"That's what got it all together and saying," let's decide how we're going to move forward. "That flows from that."
Towards multilingualism
South Africa has 11 official languages: Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Sepedi, Setswana, English, Sesotho, Xitsonga, Siswati, Tshivenda and Ndebele .
Their constitutional recognition came with the advent of democracy, with the aim of helping to put an end to institutional racism and to remedy the bitter historical divisions of South Africa.
"In an ideal world, we would like all languages to have the same status in education, but this is not practically possible or achievable, so that little else happens in other languages", told the BBC the spokesman of the University of Pretoria.
"The university will continue to encourage multilingualism and we will provide support services to students when they register – as far as possible in their mother tongue."
Graduation and other official ceremonies will continue to present the three languages already used for these occasions – English, Afrikaans and Sepedi.
Credit: The BBC
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