Multilingualism in Transformative Spaces: Contact and Conviviality

2009

Much language planning and policy in recent years in South Africa tends to overlook linguistic situations and practices, and focuses on notions of top-down language policy and implementation. This does not fit easily with the current multilingualism dynamics of late post-modern societies, which are increasingly characterized by a culture of consumerism and politics of aspiration. Taking its point of departure from a critical analysis of linguistic practices, in the form of visual literacies (billboards) in a township in South Africa, this thesis aims to draw forth alternative approaches that focus on the notion of sociolinguistic consumption, politics of aspiration and stylization of self, as a means of addressing the linguistic situation, and highlighting implications for language planning and multilingualism. June 2009 iv Declaration I declare that Multilingual landscapes: the politics of language and self in a South African township in transformation is my own work, that has not been submitted for any degree or examination in any other University, and that all sources I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by complete references. Sibonile Mpendukana June 2009 Signature…………………………… v This thesis would have been impossible without my supervisor's motivation, foresight and insightful knowledge of linguistics and I can never thank you enough for the wonderful support that you have given me throughout the years. You have been a pillar of strength. All credit goes to Professor Stroud. Thank you for believing in my abilities and your constant encouragements to bring out the best in me, which I admit was not easy at all. I'd like to thank Professor Felix Banda who encouraged me to pursue postgraduate studies, when I thought I was done with studying. Thank you for your motivation, Ndibamba ngazibini!. I had never imagined myself as a postgraduate student, not even in my wildest dreams. To the linguistics department staff and colleagues Ndiyabulela kakhulu! The writing process of this thesis has not been easy. I owe debts of gratitude to lot of people who have helped and encouraged me along the way. I mention no names, but you know who you are. Thank you my friends and family for your love and support! vi

A major challenge facing South Africa is that of reconstructing a meaningful and inclusive notion of citizenship in the aftermath of its apartheid past and in the face of narratives of divisiveness that reach back from this past and continue to reverberate in the present. Many of the problems confronting South African social transformation are similar to the rest of the postcolonial world that continues to wrestle with the inherited colonial divide between citizen and subject. In this paper, we explore how engagement with diversity and marginalization is taking place across a range of non-institutional and informal political arenas. Here, we elaborate on an approach towards the linguistic practices of the political everyday in terms of a notion of linguistic citizenship and by way of conclusion argue that the contradictions and turmoils of contemporary South Africa require further serious deliberation around alternative notions of citizenship and their semiotics.

2016

Liesel Hibbert is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa. Her interests include discourse studies, South African writing, linguistic ethnography, political rhetoric, stylistics, the bilingual classroom and higher education pedagogy. Her previous publications include Multilingual Universities in South Africa (Multilingual Matters, 2014), which she co-edited with Christa van der Walt.

Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2009

This paper is a summary of the four papers presented by the invited panel on African multilingualism to ISB8. The presenters and the respective countries they represented were panel chair Charlyn Dyers (South Africa), Felix Banda (Zambia), Feliciano Chimbutane (Mozambique) and Omondi Oketch (Kenya). The four papers in this panel apply the notion of multilingualism as social practice to the urban African context in a post-modern era characterized by intense mobility, not only across spaces but also across linguistic and other semiotic systems. In particular, they reveal how identities are performed through harnessing multiple semiotic systems, different practices and modalities, and how different semiotic resources are adopted, reconstituted and adapted to different contexts and communication needs, leading to the transformation and reconstruction of everyday discourses.

Two paradigms of communication confront each other in South Africa today. One posits an ideal public sphere that recognizes the task of mediation but also requires its effacement. The other, frustrated by deferral, seeks to bypass mediation through apparently immediate forms of speech that range from visual slogans to messianic utterances that can be heard even by the dead. When viewed ethnographically, these competing conceptions and aspirations cannot be linked to particular technologies. On the contrary, the social scene is technologically heterogeneous. Epochal and ontological schemata of mediatic displacement must thus be rethought. In this paper I pursue such a rethinking on the basis of long-term ethnography in the gold-mining region of South Africa following the infamously violent assault on striking miners at Marikana.

and sharing with colleagues.

Applies Linguistics Review, 2022

This article draws on a transidiomatic interaction between South Africa and Brazil activists to investigate the emergence of "hybrids" (Latour 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press) of body, language, and politics, while simultaneously looking to the contextual objectification of communicative resources. The interaction took place during the 2013 Circulando, an annual event promoted by the NGO Raízes em Movimento in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro. As both Brazil and South Africa were on the route of mega sporting events and the neoliberal transformation of the city into business, activists from both peripheries produced comparable views of their struggle against forced removals ahead of the FIFA World Cup. In this ethnographic case, translanguaging as hybrid embodied practice occurs alongside other semiotic moves, such as circumscribing specific pragmatic functions. The empirical and epistemic findings may be of relevance for translanguaging research. Specifically, activists' engagement with "non-modern" modes of hybridization (e.g., their contextual mingling of language resources, technologies and the body) and "modern" forms of objectification, such as the circumscription of specific "genres of listening" (Marsilli-Vargas 2022. Genres of listening: An ethnography of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires. Durham: Duke University Press) suggest that it is not fruitful seeing as separate in our data the dynamics of hybridization and objectification, or the dynamics of transglossia and uniformization.

International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2000

Rapid urbanization and the approach adopted by the authorities during the previous dispensation have left the new democratic government with townships and informal settlements on the peripheries of the urban concentrations of South Africa. Contact at all levels between Speakers of the nine Bantu languages of South Africa, together with the process of modernization, characterize the social dynamics of these urban societies. The result has been multilingual communities that interact on a daily basis in the urban areas and their peripheries in both a dynamic and complex ränge of contexts. Multilingual interaction fuelled by the competitive forces of supply and demand coupled with the free movement of communities have resulted in a hybrid form of identity, which distinguishes urban people from their rural counterparts. This paper examines the relationships that exist between the languages and Speech varieties of some selected urban communities and their ethnic and assumed linguistic identities. It has been found that the boundaries and distinctions between ethnic identities and the identities assumed by urban residents become blurred and indistinct, with their lifestyles and sociocultural characteristics changing äs they are absorbed within the urban areas of South Africa.