By PHENYO MOKGOTHU

25 June 2025- In a dusty rural town, a grandmother tunes into a crackling radio broadcast. The voice on air speaks no English or Afrikaans, but her mother tongue, a language rarely heard outside of family gatherings or village meetings.

In that moment, she is not an outsider to the national conversation, but she is its centre. It’s a moment of recognition, of relevance, and increasingly, of resistance. Community media, those small, often underfunded stations and publications, are doing what mainstream outlets largely neglect.

They are preserving South Africa’s indigenous languages. While national broadcasters prioritise dominant languages for reach and revenue, community media fill a critical void.

They speak in isiNdebele, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, and Setswana, not just about communities, but with them, in their voices. This work is more than noble, it is necessary.

South Africa’s language policy promises inclusivity, but the lived reality tells another story. Indigenous languages remain marginalised, casualties of colonial legacies, market logic, and the homogenising forces of globalisation.

Community media push back against this erasure every day, but they cannot do it alone. At the heart of this struggle are the practitioners, journalists, radio hosts, and editors who are not merely messengers, but cultural custodians.

They do more than deliver news, they carry idioms, proverbs, metaphors, and the rhythm of daily life into public discourse. Their work ensures that indigenous languages are not just spoken, but heard, not just remembered, but lived.

But for this preservation to become policy, academics must leave the lecture halls and join the frontlines. Linguists and researchers hold the tools to document, analyse, and legitimise these community efforts.

Collaborations between scholars and media workers can produce glossaries, develop training manuals, and generate research that validates indigenous language media as essential, not optional.

Universities, too, have a responsibility. They must establish language innovation hubs where students, journalists, and linguists co-create content in indigenous tongues, podcasts, community newspapers, and digital platforms.

It’s not just about preservation, it’s about evolution. Indigenous languages must not only survive the present but also shape the future.

The stakes could not be higher. A 2022 study by the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources found that less than 5% of online content is produced in indigenous languages. We risk digitising a future where our linguistic diversity is reduced to memory.

Preserving indigenous languages isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about power. Language shapes who gets heard and who is forgotten.

When community media speak in indigenous tongues, they remind us that these languages are not relics. They are tools of knowledge, identity, and democracy.

In a country as linguistically rich as South Africa, silence should never be the fate of any language. If we are serious about cultural preservation, we must tune into the frequencies where these voices still speak and amplify them before they fade out for good.

Back in that rural home, the grandmother listens not just with her ears, but with her history. Each word she hears in her language is part of a world she thought the nation had left behind.

Her radio may crackle, but her language still sings, and with it, so does her sense of belonging.

(Note: Mr Phenyo Mokgothu is a postgraduate student at the Indigenous Language Media in Africa Research entity at North West University.)

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