Dyers, Charlyn16/02/201416/02/20142004Dyers, C. (2004). Ten years of democracy: attitudes and identity among some South African school children. Per Linguam: a Journal of Language Learning, 20(1):22-350259-23122224-0012https://hdl.handle.net/10566/1023Ten years into South Africa�s democracy, how do school children feel about themselves as part of specific groups, and what is the role of language in their socio-cultural identities? This paper looks at the ways in which two groups of fourteen-year-old Xhosa-speaking and mixed-race �Coloured� South African secondary school learners in a new housing area near Cape Town negotiate their identities through language in a context of rapid social change. It analyses their beliefs and attitudes about the languages and speech communities to which they are exposed.en� 2004 Dyers; licensee University of Stellenbosch. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Socio-cultural identitiesSouth AfricaDemocracySchool childrenArticle