| First of all... ...I am grateful to all the people who have kindly taken the effort to return my questionnaire. This has been a very interesting study and the results are very remarkable and sometimes even surprising. However, I would like to emphasize that I don't consider the project to be finished. So if you haven't participated yet, please feel free to do so! Scope and limitations The scope of my study comprises 19 filled-in questionnaires (so far!), which is not a very high number for a scientific statement and makes any conclusions very tentative and preliminary. (These include replies up to February 18th 2006, everything received after that date has not been considered yet.) One has to bear in mind that in order to get a truly representative picture of the public's attitudes, it is necessary to examine a considerably larger body of replies. It is therefore that I regard this survey as work in progress, or a "first glimpse" at the issue, which can give us an idea of what might be expected from further research. I do not claim to be able to make any definite statements about people's attitudes on the whole, but nevertheless, some interesting tendencies can be observed. Moreover, the informants make up an extremely homogeneous group, consisting almost entirely of university students of the age group between 16 and 25 years. Unfortunately, only 3 female informants have participated, so the balance as to the views correlating to gender is not given. My means of finding people who were willing to participate were very restricted and an important aid was the African web-forum eDumela, where I also posted this survey. But this also entails that the majority of responses were sent by users of this forum - that is, young people with internet access, which has its own implications as to their use of language(s). Nevertheless, in spite of all these shortcomings, the results are very revealing in some respects, and definitely fascinating. I have not provided any elaborate interpretations of my findings - I leave it up to you to decide for yourself whether you think they were predictable. Any comments or suggestions are most welcome and highly appreciated! Thanks a million to everybody who has contributed to the outcome of this research!! |
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| Melanie |
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