TEXT A: The Language I Dream In (an original essay written for this practice paper)
(1) My grandmother counted in isiZulu, scolded in Sesotho and prayed in English. As a child in her house in Soweto, I never noticed that this was unusual. Language was simply weather: it changed with the room you entered and the person you found there, and you dressed for it without thinking.
(2) It was only at secondary school that I learned that languages could be ranked. Our English teacher, a precise woman who wore her reading glasses on a silver chain, returned my first essay with a single comment in red ink: 'Too many voices. Choose one.' I remember the shame more clearly than the essay. I had written about my grandmother's kitchen and, without meaning to, I had let her words into it: the isiZulu she used for a pot scrubbed so often that it shone like a mirror, the Sesotho she muttered when the bread refused to rise. To my teacher these were errors of register. To me they were the only accurate words.
(3) For years afterwards I wrote two kinds of sentences. At school I wrote the kind that earned marks: tidy, borrowed, safe. At home, in an exercise book I kept under my mattress, I wrote the other kind, crowded and loud and, I was sure, embarrassing. I hid that book the way other teenagers hid letters, because it seemed to reveal something about me that I had been taught to be ashamed of: that I did not live in one language, and therefore, perhaps, did not fully belong in any.
(4) Linguists have a name for what my family did all day. They call it code-switching: moving between languages within a single conversation, sometimes within a single sentence. For a long time it was treated as a symptom of confusion, proof that a speaker had mastered neither language properly. Many researchers now describe it differently, as a skill that requires a speaker to hold two grammars in mind at once and to judge, moment by moment, which one will carry a meaning best. My grandmother, who left school at twelve to look after her younger brothers, was performing every evening a feat of mental agility that I had been taught to correct.
(5) South Africa recognises twelve official languages, the most recent being South African Sign Language, added in 2023. On paper, few nations on earth are so generous to their languages. In practice, as anyone who has filled in a form at a government office knows, one language does most of the work. English is the language of the contract, the application and the job interview, and so it is also the language that many parents choose, often at real cost, for their children's schooling. I do not blame them. My own mother made that choice for me, scraping together the fees for a school across town, and I would not have the career I have without it.
(6) But a choice made out of necessity can still be a loss. Educators have argued for decades that children learn to read most easily in the language they speak at home. A child who must learn in a language she does not hear at the supper table has to learn everything twice: first the words, and then the ideas the words are meant to carry. Some children manage this brilliantly. Many quietly fall behind and conclude, wrongly, that they are not clever, when the truth is that they have been asked to climb a staircase while carrying a second one on their backs.
(7) My own reconciliation came late, in a second-hand bookshop in my second year at university. I found a novel in which the characters spoke the way my family spoke: in English that bent and borrowed, that dropped into another language at the moment of greatest feeling and climbed back out again. Nobody in that book apologised for it. I read it standing up, in a single afternoon, and I remember the strange sensation of being recognised by a stranger.
(8) I have since come to think that my teacher was not entirely wrong. A piece of writing does need control, and a reader should never feel abandoned in a crowd of voices. Where she was mistaken was in where control comes from. It does not come from silencing voices but from conducting them, as a conductor does not ask the violins to play like the drums but decides when each should be heard.
(9) People sometimes ask me which language I dream in. The honest answer is that my dreams, like my grandmother's kitchen, are crowded. Someone is always counting in isiZulu, someone is always scolding in Sesotho, and somewhere, faintly, someone is praying in English. I have stopped trying to choose one voice. I have learned, instead, to choose well.