Walk into a university lecture hall in Gaborone, open a government tender document, or scroll through the feed of a young Motswana professional, and one pattern repeats with almost total consistency: English. It is the language of higher education, of formal employment, of digital platforms, and increasingly, of how young Batswana think and write about their own country. Setswana — the national language, spoken as a first or second language by the overwhelming majority of the population — occupies an entirely different space: the home, the village, casual conversation, certain media and entertainment, but rarely the spaces where economic and intellectual capital is built.
The question this raises is not sentimental. It is structural: is this division costing Botswana something, in an era where language, knowledge production, and digital infrastructure are more tightly linked than ever before?
Questioning the Assumption
Underneath Botswana’s language arrangement sits an assumption so deeply embedded it is rarely stated, let alone examined: that English is essential for innovation, for education quality, and for global competitiveness — and that any space given to Setswana in these domains comes at the cost of all three.
This assumption has institutional weight behind it. Botswana’s language-in-education policy designates Setswana as the medium of instruction only at the earliest stage of primary school — Standard 1 — after which English takes over as the language of instruction for the rest of formal education, including at the University of Botswana, where Setswana exists primarily as a subject of study within the Department of Languages and Social Sciences Education rather than as a medium through which other subjects are taught. Research on the implementation of this policy has documented persistent friction — teachers navigating a transition that does not map cleanly onto how children in linguistically diverse classrooms actually think and learn — but the policy framework itself has remained largely stable.
The assumption is also visible in digital life. Botswana’s online content — news, government communication, social media discourse among young professionals — is overwhelmingly English-driven, even when the audience is overwhelmingly Setswana-speaking in daily life.
Global Counter-Examples
The assumption does not survive contact with the evidence from countries that have actually built advanced, globally competitive knowledge economies.
China has built the foundation of its science, technology, and education systems on Mandarin. Its universities, its research output, its technology sector — all operate primarily in the national language, with English functioning as a tool for international engagement rather than as the substrate of domestic intellectual life. South Korea’s innovation economy — from Samsung’s research labs to its globally dominant entertainment and gaming industries — runs on Korean. Japan’s research and industrial ecosystems are Japanese-led, to the point that international researchers and businesses routinely cite language as a barrier to entry into the Japanese market, not the reverse. Germany maintains a robust academic and engineering tradition conducted substantially in German, with German remaining a major language of patent filings and technical literature. France has built and maintained an extensive French-language institutional and academic infrastructure, often explicitly as a matter of policy, precisely to ensure that French remains a language of knowledge production rather than only a language of culture.
Innovation is not dependent on English — it is dependent on institutional strength and knowledge production systems.
None of these countries are less innovative for conducting their core intellectual life in their national language. If anything, the relationship runs the other way: a society that can produce, debate, teach, and apply knowledge in the language most of its population actually thinks in has removed a layer of translation — literal and cognitive — between its people and the knowledge economy.
Botswana’s Reality
Botswana’s position is, in important respects, the inverse of these examples. English dominance in formal education is comprehensive and begins early — by the upper levels of primary school, English is the language of instruction across the curriculum. Setswana is underrepresented in academic and technical domains; there is no substantial body of Setswana-language scientific, technical, or academic literature comparable to what exists in English, simply because the institutional infrastructure to produce it — journals, textbooks, terminology development for technical fields — has never been built at scale. Digital content, as noted, is largely English-driven, meaning that even Botswana’s own emerging digital economy is, by default, conducted in a language that is not the first language of most of the people building and using it.
It is worth noting that Botswana’s language landscape is not simply English versus Setswana. The country officially recognises several other languages — Kalanga, Kgalagadi, Shona, Mbukushu, Ndebele, Tshwa, and !Xóõ among others — and the Ministry of Basic Education has in recent years begun rolling out mother-tongue instruction materials for additional languages beyond Setswana across the country’s education regions, with further languages including Ju|’hoan, Shua, Nambya, and others planned for subsequent phases. This is a meaningful acknowledgment that the English/Setswana hierarchy is itself incomplete — there are Batswana for whom even Setswana is not a first language, and the linguistic hierarchy in education has multiple tiers, not two.
The Core Challenge
The issue is not English itself — it is the overdependence on English as the sole gateway to knowledge, innovation, and opportunity.
This distinction matters because the alternative to “English dominance” is not “replace English with Setswana.” English’s role as a global lingua franca, and Botswana’s historical and economic ties to English-speaking markets, make fluency in English a genuine asset that no responsible policy would discard. The question is whether English functioning as the only gateway — the only language in which advanced education, technical training, and digital economic participation meaningfully happen — creates a bottleneck.
Consider the practical effect on, for instance, the AI and digital economy ambitions discussed elsewhere in this series. If Botswana’s digital transformation strategy assumes that digital literacy and AI literacy are delivered through English-language curricula and English-language digital interfaces, then a population for whom English is a second language is, by definition, accessing that transformation through an additional layer of friction — friction that a population with mother-tongue digital and technical resources would not face. South Africa’s draft National AI Policy explicitly identifies this, committing to digitizing and translating content across all of its eleven official languages as part of its AI strategy — an acknowledgment that language access is now understood as digital infrastructure, not merely a cultural nicety.
Language Is Infrastructure, Not Heritage
Language relevance is determined by institutional and digital use, not symbolic preservation. Setswana is not at risk of disappearing — it remains the dominant spoken language for most of Botswana’s population, and recent moves to expand mother-tongue instruction for other indigenous languages suggest growing institutional recognition of multilingual reality. But “not disappearing” and “fully leveraged as part of the national knowledge and digital infrastructure” are two very different conditions, and Botswana currently sits much closer to the former than the latter.
The countries that have built genuinely competitive knowledge economies in their own languages did not do so by accident, and they did not do so by treating their national languages as symbolic heritage to be preserved alongside, but separate from, the real business of education and innovation. They built the institutional infrastructure — terminology, literature, digital tools — that made their languages functional vehicles for advanced knowledge. Whether Setswana follows that path, or remains confined to the domains it has occupied for the past half-century while English absorbs an ever-larger share of Botswana’s intellectual and digital life, is a choice about infrastructure investment, not a question of cultural sentiment.
Sources: University of Botswana, Department of Languages and Social Sciences Education; Government of Botswana Languages Policy in Education; UNICEF Botswana language and learning research; comparative national AI language policy (South Africa draft AI Policy 2026)