The title of this book indicates quite accurately what it wants to do: it wants to discuss the role which language, or more properly, languages, can perform in the reconstruction and development of South Africa. The approach followed in Language in South Africa (LiSA for short) is characterised by a number of features: (a) it wants to be factually based and (b) theoretically informed, yet (c) acknowledges that an ideological point of departure is inevitable in the present South African context.