The vice-chairperson for ILAF, Dr Zakeera Docrat has recently been awarded the most outstanding emerging researcher award in Southern Africa at the African Languages Association of Southern Africa’s annual conference last week.
The recognition was for active contribution to research around the role of African languages in the legal system, which includes her handbook on legal languages.
Dr. Docrat recently launched her handbook titled: Legal Languages and the quest for linguistic equality in South Africa and beyond in partnership with Professor Russell Kaschula and Professor Monwabisi Ralarala. This, she said, was a twelve-year journey of research, where she’s has learnt that it’s easy to criticise but the difficult task is to come up with solutions.
The handbook is based on Dr. Docrat’s Ph.D. thesis awarded from Rhodes University in 2020.
She said we often see transformation as only racial or gender-focused and we exclude languages that also form a part of the transformation. Among what she wanted to achieve with this book, was access to justice using all official languages spoken and understood by South Africans and beyond.
Dr. Docrat is currently a vice-chairperson for Indigenous Languages Action Forum (ILAF), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Forensic Linguistics/Language and Law at the University of the Western Cape.
She has received NRF funding in the form of scholarships and bursaries for Bachelor of Arts Honours Degree in African Languages; Master of Arts Degree in African Languages with a focus on Language and Law; PhD in African Languages with a focus on Forensic Linguistics/Language and Law, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2020.
