Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T15:36:55.431Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 11 - Multilingualism in South African Education: A Southern Perspective

from II - Sociolinguistics, Globalisation and Multilingualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2019

Raymond Hickey
Affiliation:
Universität Duisburg–Essen
Get access

Summary

In this chapter, we contextualise English within a decolonial perspective of multilingualism in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly South Africa. In so doing, we lay bare some of the historically invisibilised circuits of intellectual exchange flowing from the geopolitical South to the geopolitical north around multilingualism. After a short overview of the deep decolonial roots pertaining to discussions of African multilingualism, we move to a discussion of multilingual education with the circumstances of the early 1990s in which at least three views of multilingualism in education circulated. We conclude by drawing attention to two notions in particular with ‘southern’ origins – ‘functional multilingualism’ and ‘linguistic citizenship’ – that we believe contribute to serious discussions of North–South engagement on understandings of multilingualism and multilingual education.

Type
Chapter
Information
English in Multilingual South Africa
The Linguistics of Contact and Change
, pp. 216 - 238
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Achebe, Chinua (1958). Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Achmat, Zachie (1992). Yo dude, cosa wena kyk a? The Multilingual Classroom. Documentary film (video). Directed by Zachie Achmat and produced by Jack Lewis for the National Language Project, Cape Town, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhzhq46gLCo (last accessed 20 May 2019).Google Scholar
Agnihotri, Rama Kant (1992). ‘India: multilingual perspectives’, in Crawhall, Nigel (ed.), Democratically Speaking: International Perspectives on Language Planning. Salt River, Cape Town: National Language Project, pp. 4655.Google Scholar
Agnihotri, Rama Kant (1995). ‘Multilingualism as a classroom resource’, in Heugh, Kathleen, Siegrühn, Amanda, and Plüddemann, Peter (eds.), Multilingual Education for South Africa. Johannesburg: Heinemann, pp. 314.Google Scholar
Akinnaso, F. Niyi (1991). ‘Toward the development of a multilingual language policy in Nigeria’, Applied Linguistics 12(1): 2961.Google Scholar
Alexander, Neville (1989). Language Policy and National Unity in South Africa/Azania. Cape Town: Buchu Books.Google Scholar
Alexander, Neville (1992). ‘South Africa: harmonising Nguni and Sotho’, in Crawhall, Nigel (ed.), Democratically Speaking: International Perspectives on Language Planning. Salt River, Cape Town: National Language Project, pp. 5668.Google Scholar
Anzaldúa, Gloria (1987). Borderlands/La frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.Google Scholar
Bamgbose, Ayo (ed.) (1976). Mother Tongue Education: The West African Experience. London and Paris: Hodder and Stoughton, and UNESCO Press.Google Scholar
Bamgbose, Ayo (1987). ‘When is language planning not planning?’, The Journal of West African Languages 7(1): 614.Google Scholar
Bamgbose, Ayo (2000). Language and Exclusion: The Consequences of Language Policies in Africa, Vol. 12. Münster: LIT Verlag.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2005). ‘Situating language rights: English and Swahili in Tanzania revisited’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(3): 390417.Google Scholar
Chakravarty, Kalyn Kumar (2011). ‘Introduction’, in Devy, Ganesh Narayan, Davis, Geoffrey V. and Chakravarty, Kalyn Kumar (eds.), Voice and Memory: Indigenous Imagination and Expression. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, pp. xiiixxv.Google Scholar
Chimbutane, Feliciano and Stroud, Christopher (eds.) (2012). Educação Bilingue em Moçambique: Reflectindo Criticamente sobre Políticas e Práticas [Bilingual Education in Mozambique: Critical reflection on Policies and Practices]. Maputo: Texto Editores.Google Scholar
Chumbow, Beban Sammy (1987). ‘Towards a language planning model for Africa’, The Journal of West African Languages 7(1): 1522.Google Scholar
Chumbow, Beban Sammy (1990). ‘The place of the mother tongue in the National Policy on Education’, in Nọlue Emenanjọ, E. (ed.), Multilingualism, Minority Languages and Policy in Nigeria, Central Books in collaboration with the Linguistic Association of Nigeria, pp. 6172.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John L. (2012). ‘Theory from the South: or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa’, Anthropological Forum 22(2): 113–31.Google Scholar
Connell, Raewyn (2007). Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Crawhall, Nigel (ed.) (1992). Democratically Speaking: International Perspectives on Language Planning. Salt River, Cape Town: National Language Project.Google Scholar
De Klerk, Gerda (1995). ‘Three languages in one school: a multilingual exploration in a primary school’, in Heugh, Kathleen, Siegrühn, Amanda, and Plüddemann, Peter (eds.), Multilingual Education for South Africa. Johannesburg: Heinemann, pp. 2833.Google Scholar
De Klerk, Gerda (1996). The Power of Babel: Support for Teachers in Multilingual Classrooms. Cape Town: Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa.Google Scholar
Department of Education (DOE) (1997). Language in Education Policy. Pretoria: Department of Education.Google Scholar
Dua, Hans R. (1994). Hegemony of English, No. 1. Mysore: Yashoda Publications.Google Scholar
Fafunwa, Aliu Babatunde and Aisiku, J. U. (eds.) (1982). Education in Africa: A Comparative Survey. London: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
García, Ofelia and Wei, Lionel (2014). Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harries, Patrick (1988). ‘The roots of ethnicity: discourse and the politics of language construction in South-East Africa’, African Affairs 87 (346): 2552.Google Scholar
Heller, Monica (1999). Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Heller, Monica (2007). Bilingualism: A Social Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Heugh, Kathleen (1987). ‘Underlying Ideologies of Language Medium Policies in Multilingual Societies with Particular Reference to Southern Africa’, unpublished M Phil dissertation, University of Cape Town.Google Scholar
Heugh, Kathleen (1995a). ‘Disabling and enabling: implications of language policy trends in South Africa’, in Mesthrie, Rajend (ed.), Language and Social History: Studies in South African Sociolinguistics. Cape Town: David Philip, pp. 329–50.Google Scholar
Heugh, Kathleen (1995b). ‘From unequal education to the real thing’, in Heugh, Kathleen, Siegrühn, Amanda, and Plüddemann, Peter (eds.), Multilingual Education for South Africa, Johannesburg: Heinemann Publishers, pp. 4252.Google Scholar
Heugh, Kathleen (1995c). ‘The multilingual school: modified dual medium’, in Heugh, Kathleen, Siegrühn, Amanda and Plüddemann, Peter (eds.), Multilingual Education for South Africa, Johannesburg: Heinemann Publishers, pp. 83–8.Google Scholar
Heugh, Kathleen (1999). ‘Languages, development and reconstructing education in South Africa’, International Journal of Educational Development 19: 301–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heugh, Kathleen (2003). ‘Can authoritarian separatism give way to linguistic rights? A South African case study’, Current Issues in Language Planning 4: 126–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heugh, Kathleen (2013). ‘Multilingual education policy in South Africa: constrained by theoretical and historical disconnections’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 33: 215-337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heugh, Kathleen (2017). ‘Re-placing and re-centring Southern Multilingualisms. a de-colonial project’, in Kerfoot, Caroline and Hyltenstam, Kenneth (eds.), Entangled Discourses: South–North Orders of Visibility. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 209–29.Google Scholar
Heugh, Kathleen, Siegrühn, Amanda and Plüddemann, Peter (eds.) (1995). Multilingual Education for South Africa. Johannesburg: Heinemann Pearson.Google Scholar
Hirson, Baruch (1981). ‘Language control and resistance in South Africa’, African Affairs 80(319): 219–37.Google Scholar
Hoppers, Catherine Alum Odora (ed.) (2002). Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems: Towards a Philosophy of Articulation. Claremont, Cape Town: New Africa Books.Google Scholar
Ianco-Worrall, Anita (1972). ‘Bilingualism and cognitive development’, Child Development 43(4): 1390–400.Google Scholar
Kerfoot, Caroline and Hyltenstam, Kenneth (eds.) (2017). Entangled Discourses: South–North Orders of Visibility. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerfoot, Caroline and Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne Marie (2015). ‘Language in epistemic access: mobilising multilingualism and literacy development for more equitable education in South Africa’, Language and Education 29(3): 177–85.Google Scholar
Kusch, Rodolfo ([1970]2010). Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Lambert, Wallace (1975). ‘Culture and language as factors in learning and education’, in Wolfgang, Aaron (ed.), Education of Immigrant Students. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.Google Scholar
Letele, Gladstone Llewellyn (1945). A Preliminary Study of the Lexicological Influence of the Nguni Languages on Southern Sotho. Lovedale: Lovedale Mission Press.Google Scholar
Lo Bianco, Joseph (1987). National Policy on Languages. Canberra: Government Printer.Google Scholar
Makalela, Leketi (2005). “‘We speak eleven tongues’: reconstructing multilingualism in South Africa”, in Brock-Utne, Birgit and Hopson, Rodney (eds), Languages of Instruction for African Emancipation: Focus on Postcolonial Contexts and Considerations. Cape Town and Dar es Salaam: CASAS and Mjuti n Nyota, pp. 6887.Google Scholar
Makalela, Leketi (2015). ‘Moving out of linguistic boxes: the effects of translanguaging strategies for multilingual classrooms’, Language and Education 29(3): 200–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Makalela, Leketi (2017). ‘Translanguaging Practices in a South African Institution of Higher Learning: A Case of Ubuntu Multilingual Return’, in Mazak, Catherine and Carroll, Kevin (eds.), Translanguaging in Higher Education: Beyond Monolingual Ideologies. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 1128.Google Scholar
Makhudu, K. Dennis (1995). ‘An introduction to Flaaitaal’, in Mesthrie, Rajend (ed.), Language and Social History: Studies in South African Sociolinguistics. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, pp. 298305.Google Scholar
Makoe, Pinky and McKinney, Carolyn (2014). ‘Linguistic ideologies in multilingual South African suburban schools’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 35(7): 658–73.Google Scholar
Makoni, Sinfree (1998) ‘African languages as European scripts: the shaping of communal memory’, in Nuttall, Sarah and Coetzee, Carli (eds.), Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 242–8.Google Scholar
Makoni, Sinfree (2003). ‘From misinvention to disinvention of language: multilingualism and the South African Constitution’, in Makoni, Sinfree, Smitherman, Geneva, Ball, Aretha and Spears, Arthur K. (eds.), Black Linguistics: Language, Society and Politics in Africa and the Americas. New York: Routledge, pp. 132–53.Google Scholar
Makoni, Sinfree (2016). ‘Romanticizing differences and managing diversities: a perspective on harmonization, language policy, and planning’, Language Policy 15(3): 223–34.Google Scholar
Malherbe, Ernst Gideon (1946). The Bilingual School: A Study of Bilingualism in South Africa. London: Longmans.Google Scholar
McKinney, Carolyn (2016). Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling: Ideologies in Practice. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mignolo, Walter (2009). ‘Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and de-colonial freedom.’ Theory, Culture and Society 2(7–8): 159–81.Google Scholar
Nakata, Martin (2002). ‘Indigenous knowledge and the cultural interface: underlying issues at the intersection of knowledge and information systems’, IFLA Journal 28(5–6): 281–91.Google Scholar
Nhlapo, Jacob (1944). Bantu Babel: Will the Bantu languages live? The Sixpenny Library, No. 4. Cape Town: The African Bookman.Google Scholar
Nhlapo, Jacob (1945). Nguni and Sotho. Cape Town: The African Bookman.Google Scholar
Nomlomo, Vuyokazi (2003). ‘Accommodating diversity in the isiXhosa classroom’, in Brock-Utne, Birgit, Desai, Zubeida and Qorro, Martha (eds.), Language of Instruction in Tanzania and South Africa (LOITASA). Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: E & D, pp. 6979.Google Scholar
Nomlomo, Vuyokazi and Desai, Zubeida (2014). ‘Reflections on the development of a pre-service language curriculum for the B Ed (Foundation Phase)’. South African Journal of Childhood Education 4(3): 87102.Google Scholar
Ntshangase, Dumisani Krushchev (2002). ‘Language and language practices in Soweto’, in Mesthrie, Rajend (ed.), Language in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 407–15.Google Scholar
Ntuli, P. Pitika (2002). ‘Indigenous knowledge systems and the African renaissance’, in Hoppers, Catherine Odora, Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems: Towards a Philosophy of Articulation. Claremont, Cape Town: New Africa Books, pp. 5366.Google Scholar
Organisation of African Unity (OAU)/Organisation de l’unité Africaine (OUA) ([1986]1987). The Language Plan of Action for Africa. Addis Ababa: OAU/OUA, www.bisharat.net/Documents/OAU-LPA-86.htm (last accessed 20 May 2019).Google Scholar
Pattanayak, Debi Prasanna (ed.) (1990). Multilingualism in India. Clevedon and Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Plüddemann, Peter, Braam, Daryl, October, Michelle, and Wababa, Zola (2004). ‘Dual-medium and parallel-medium schooling in the Western Cape: From default to design’. PRAESA Occasional Papers, 17. Cape Town: Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa.Google Scholar
Povinelli, Elizabeth (2011). Economics of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Ranger, Terence (1984). Missionaries, Migrants and the Manyika: The Invention of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, African Studies Institute.Google Scholar
Robb, Helen (1995). ‘Multilingual preschooling’, in Heugh, Kathleen, Siegrühn, Amanda, and Plüddemann, Peter (eds.), Multilingual Education for South Africa. Cape Town, South Africa: Heinemann, pp. 1522.Google Scholar
Rubagumya, Casmir M. (1986). ‘Language planning in the Tanzanian educational system: problems and prospects’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 7(4): 283300.Google Scholar
Rubagumya, Casmir. M. (ed.) (1994). Teaching and Researching Language in African Classrooms. Clevedon and Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Ruiz, Richard (1984). ‘Orientations in Language Planning’, NABE Journal 8(2): 1534.Google Scholar
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2012). ‘Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South’, Africa Development 37(1): 4367.Google Scholar
Siatchitema, A. Kathleen (1992). ‘When nationalism conflicts with nationalist goals: Zambia’, in Crawhall, Nigel (ed.,) Democratically Speaking. International Perspectives on Language Planning. Salt River, Cape Town: National Language Project, pp. 1721.Google Scholar
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Stroud, Christopher (2001). ‘African mother tongue programs and the politics of language: linguistic citizenship versus linguistic human rights’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 22(4): 339–55.Google Scholar
Stroud, Christopher (2009). ‘Towards a postliberal theory of citizenship’, in Petrovic, John (ed.), International Perspectives on Bilingual Education: Policy, Practice and Controversy. New York: Information Age Publishing, pp. 191218.Google Scholar
Stroud, Christopher and Heugh, Kathleen (2004). ‘Language rights and linguistic citizenship’, in Freeland, Jane and Patrick, Donna (eds.), Language Rights and Language Survival: Sociolinguistic and Sociocultural Perspectives. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, pp. 191218.Google Scholar
Tadadjeu, Maurice (1975). ‘Language planning in Cameroon: toward a trilingual education system’, Working Papers in Linguistics 19. Ohio State University, pp. 53–75.Google Scholar
Taylor, Nick and Vinjevold, Penny (eds.) (1999). Getting Learning Right: Report of the President’s Education Initiative Research Project. Johannesburg: Joint Education Trust.Google Scholar
Tucker, Archibald Norman (1929). The Comparative Phonetics of the Suto-Chuana Group of Bantu Languages. London: Longmans, Green and Co. (Reproduced 1969 by Gregg International Publishers, Westmead).Google Scholar
Tripathi, Prayag D. (1990). ‘English in Zambia’, English Today 6(3): 34–8.Google Scholar
Van den Berghe, Pierre (1967). ‘Language and nationalism in South Africa’, Race 9(1): 3746.Google Scholar
Versfeld, Ruth (1995). ‘Language is lekker: a language activity classroom’, in Heugh, Kathleen, Siegrühn, Amanda and Plüddemann, Peter (eds.), Multilingual Education for South Africa. Cape Town, South Africa: Heinemann, pp. 23–7.Google Scholar
Wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ (1986). Decolonising the Mind. London: James Currey.Google Scholar
Watson, Irene (2014). ‘Re-centring first nations knowledge and places in a terra nullius space’, AlterNative 10(4): 508–20.Google Scholar
Wee, Lionel (2005). ‘Intra-language discrimination and linguistic human rights: the case of Singlish’, Applied Linguistics 26(1): 4869.Google Scholar
Westcott, Nicki (2004). Sink or Swim. Navigating Language in the Classroom. Cape Town: Tomix productions for the Project of the Study of Education in South Africa (DVD), www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bJt5FVJYis (last accessed 20 May 2019).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×