Self-harm in the public spaces while trying to embrace indigenous languages in South African context

In public debates about language discourse there is commonly an agreement that people need to be enabled to express themselves sufficiently. However, there are few or no scholars who come forth to address social implementation of multi/ open language policy in the public sector. This paper adopts critical social theory (CST) to explore the debates around the cry about linguistic exclusion in public institutions which necessitates multi/ open language policy. This qualitative study purposively sampled 5 public hospital nurses and 5 public clinics nurses from two South African provinces in order to thematically analyse the findings that emanate from their experiences with regards to language policy. Findings show that the arguments for multi/ open language policy are commonly positively skewed as scholars ignore its negative aspects on implementation failures. This study contributes to literature in terms of exposing an unpopular view that multi/ open language policy has with regards to implementation and expose the likely negativity of its informal implementation. Therefore, data collected through semi-structured interviews during this study will be subject to thematic analysis as the objective is to expose that multi/ open language policy in the public hospitals and clinics has some negative aspects than having only positives.