Is Khelobedu a language or a dialect?

Abstract

The primary aim of this article is to investigate whether Khelobedu should be considered a language in its own right or whether it has correctly been classified as one of the dialects of Sepedi, referred to in Section 6(1) of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, as Sepedi, one of the 11 official languages of South Africa. The article was initiated by a dialectal controversy surrounding the politics of dialects and languages in South Africa. Dialectology as a conceptual framework was considered as the body of theory that guides this article and buttresses the authors’ point of view. The article is purely qualitative in nature and employed content analysis supplemented by focus group interviews with members of the Modjadji Traditional Council and face-to-face interviews with 20 university students who ethnically identified themselves as Balobedu. Participants for the article were purposively selected based on their proficiency and knowledge about the researched phenomenon as articulated by Creswell and Creswell. Based on lexical dissimilarities realised between Khelobedu and Sepedi, the article concludes that Khelobedu is not a dialect, but a language on its own. The findings reveal that the decision to classify Khelobedu as a dialect of Sepedi was meant to accommodate the administrative system of the apartheid regime, being a purely political exercise which lacked transparency, consultation and a linguistic justification. It is further found that decisions about whether speech forms constitute an independent language or a dialect are based on language ideology and not on linguistic criteria.