ABSTRACT
With the goal of fostering national unity and countering segmentation and tribalism, Namibia followed the example of most African nations in adopting a monolingual, exoglossic language policy when it became an independent state in 1990. English, the presumed neutral language, is the sole official language. In addition, 13 languages, among them German, whose status in Namibia is discussed in this chapter, have been designated as national languages. This chapter describes the current use of German in domains such as the media and education. Although German is spoken by fewer than 1% of the total population, it still plays an important role in Namibia and resists the English hegemony much better than the other Namibian languages, except for Afrikaans. This is because of a fruitful mix of 1) national support, 2) private support, and 3) international support from Germany.
