Not Eleven Languages: Translanguaging and South African Multilingualism in Concert 9781614515067, 9781614517078

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Leketi Makalela Not Eleven Languages

Contributions to the Sociology of Language

Edited by Ofelia García Francis M. Hult Founding editor Joshua A. Fishman

Volume 107

Leketi Makalela

Not Eleven Languages Translanguaging and South African Multilingualism in Concert

ISBN 978-1-61451-707-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-61451-506-7 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0095-4 ISSN 1861-0676 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021952138 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin Cover image: sculpies/shutterstock Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

This book is dedicated to my beloved daughters: Leleti and Koketso for their unconditional love and the life fulfilment I find in them.

Preface The 21st century provides unique sociolinguistic spaces that typify super-diversity, globalization and movement, and alternation of languages to reflect social changes and integration of societies where ‘multiplicity’ is increasingly replaced by ‘complexity’ (Blommaert, 2017; Pennycook, 2017). In this century, there has been increased immigration, tourism, exchange of business, educational and political goods and services that are tied to these complex mobilities. Like many multilingual countries such as Singapore, India and Nigeria, South Africa represents linguistic diversity and pluralism where linguistic overlaps, cultural cross-pollination define its post-modern era. South Africa too has seen multiple waves of translocal and transnational movements where strict separation of languages and people, even if desired, has exponentially become virtually impossible (Makalela, 2018a). Equally revealing is that the South African multilingualism had always been complex prior to colonization and the new waves of the 21st Century. As a cultural competence that interlocks the past and present, the depth of linguistic complexity and what the speakers do with it has been overlooked in research and therefore underrepresented by one-ness, linear and vertical outlook of multilingualism. A book that questions the often taken for granted assumptions about multilingualism in the post-Apartheid South Africa is long overdue. Since the beginning of the new socio-political dispensation, the South Africa’s language question has not been cogently described to explain, describe and provide a detailed dynamics of its society due to the amount of praise that characterized scholarship on multilingualism in the country. For the first part of the new constitutional proclamations, research on South African multilingualism glorified the commitment and the bravery of a single country to accord 11 languages an official status. It was a language miracle that followed a peaceful transition from the Apartheid regime and civil strife to an era of grandiose hope that affirmed all the cultural, linguistic, and social capitals of the people of South Africa. Indeed it was not an exaggeration that the people of South Africa spoke these languages in a long history that stretched over 400 years since the arrival of the Dutch colonizers, nearly 1400 years since the Nguni and Sotho groups migrated and about 120 000 years since the Khoi and the San people settled in this geographical space. In this way, South Africa becomes a uniquely rich environment to understand the intersection of various languages and the people’s behavior around them. It remains fitting thus to provide a panoramic account of what the post-Mandela era has achieved in valorising linguistic diversity and how this magnifies the deeply rooted social dynamics of a new democratic country. Given that it is more than 25 years of linguistic democracy and resocialization for national cohesiveness, it is increasingly important to ask https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614515067-202

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the question: how authentic is the language characterization in harmonizing the society where languages were used to create a social rift and to divide and rule the local communities? This book examines the often overlooked discursive and fluid multilingual practices in post-Apartheid South Africa and highlights massive discrepancies between these practices and the official language policy proscriptions. Indeed, South Africa remains a uniquely compelling case study for language complexities that are increasingly pervasive in multilingual countries across the globe. As stated above, it enshrined one of the most liberal multilingual policies in the world by according official status to 11 languages in order to redress ethnolinguistic imbalances that were promoted by both Apartheid and colonial language ideologies since the mid 17th century. However, it is worth noting that the discursive language practices of its speakers in the new socio-linguistic dispensation have not been cogently and comprehensively described in a book length monograph. This book challenges assumptions that led to 11 official languages and focuses on mutual inter-comprehensibility of the speakers of various languages. In doing so, it brings to light transcultural dynamism, fluid linguistic boundaries, and permeable discourses across a wide array of language variants and then questions the validity of linguistic heterogeneity which was used as a measure in making provisions for one of the world’s inclusive multilingual policy. Apart from stating this argument, the chapters also provide alternative multilingual policy directions for the future and recommendations for dynamic language-in-education practices for all students. The first part of the book focuses on the sociolinguistic context of South Africa broadly and describes the history of African languages development since 1652 when the first Dutch settlers arrived at the Cape of Good Hope. In describing the history of linguistic ‘inventions’ (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007), the book shows how different colonization epochs ushered in different language policies, which have not always been consonant with the sociolinguistic realities of the speakers. These periods include Dutch policies from 1652, English colonization from 1875 till 1947, Afrikaans Apartheid policies from 1948 to 1994, and the 11 official language policy from 1996 to date. The second part describes controversies and debates around the development of indigenous African languages. It comprehensively deals with issues around the costs of developing the languages, availability of resources, materials, and attitudes towards African languages in comparison to ex-colonial languages. These discussions are contextualized within the political, social, educational and economic spheres in which multilingual speakers find themselves in the postindependent South Africa. In this light, a debate on whether the present language

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policy provisions create sufficient space for indigenous African languages to take up roles in prestigious position is presented. The book then uses research findings that span over a period of 10 years to describe degrees of mutual intelligibility among selected Sotho languages (Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana) as a prototype for sister language clusters. In doing so, it provides evidence for mutual inter-comprehensibility and challenges the dominant view that South Africa has 11 official languages. The author takes a view that the current groupings naturally form mutually intelligible clusters and relates this discussion to the history of ethno-linguistic divisions from the earliest contact with the missionary linguists. The last part of the book discusses implications of a reduced number of languages (that is, as labelled in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa) for language policy revisions, and the consequences for literacy development and readership in African languages, as well as for the teaching of African languages to speakers of other African languages. These implications are informed by observations of fluid discourse practices, which are framed within the notion of translanguaging (Garcia, 2009): a multilingualism model where speakers socially named languages receive input and give input in any language system of choice in the process of meaning making. While scholarship on translanguaging often shows a paradox of socially named languages and the individual use of languages in the process of meaning making, this book engages with both sides of the argument: language (inter-comprehensibility) and use (translanguaging). All the parts of the book, taken together, contribute to topical sociolinguistics and language education debates, theory, and scholarship around contentious issues prevalent in multilingual countries: language boundaries, multilingual speech repertoires, cultural hybridity, multivocality, gaps between language policy and practice, and new understanding of multilingualism and bilingual speakers in the 21st century and educating multilingual children. South Africa thus provides a compelling case study to bring to light a myriad of all these current sociolinguistic concerns.

Acknowledgement I wish to extend my gratitude to the following people without which this manuscript would not have been possible. First, Ofelia Garcia and Ricardo Otheguy inspired me to write this book when they both visited my university as distinguished scholars in South Africa. We spend hours into the night exploring what 11 official languages mean. Next I would like to thank Lerato Sefoloshe and Mariyeni Matariro for the technical assistance they accorded me as I concentrated on the intellectual project side of the manuscript. Members of the Hub for Multilingual Education and Literacies at the University of the Witwatersrand were inspiring to get this work going via the monthly report systems developed. The cheers and the love from my family got me grounded throughout the long nights of writing and revisions. Ke re malebo! Le sa lahle le ka moso!

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614515067-203

Contents Preface

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Acknowledgement

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Chapter 1 African multilingualism re-defined: ‘I am because you are’ 1 1.1 Introduction 1 1.2 Ubuntu: I am an African 2 1.3 The constitution: Beyond the “one nation-one language” ideology 5 1.4 Critiques: A divide and rule continuity 7 1.5 More than 25 years later 8 1.6 Frames of languages: Leaking out of boxes 9 1.7 Conclusion 12 Chapter 2 History of language war and its sociolinguistic output 13 2.1 Introduction 13 2.2 The burden of Enlightenment period 13 2.3 Language wars and control in South Africa 14 2.4 In the beginning: Languages without history? 15 2.5 The Dutch settlers 17 2.6 Anglicization 18 2.7 The ‘Union’ of South Africa 19 2.8 Afrikaner nationalism 21 2.9 The Soweto student uprising 23 2.10 Linguistic apartheid 24 2.11 Post-apartheid Artificial constructions: A carry- over effect 25 2.12 Conclusion 26 Chapter 3 Language inventions and the role of missionary linguists 27 3.1 Introduction 27 3.2 Goals for African language inventions 28 3.3 Misrepresentations and differentiation of orthographies and labels 28 3.4 Artificial multilingualism 29

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Competing denominations and dialects across the borders European ethno-linguistic boundaries 32 Conclusion 33

Chapter 4 Myths and controversies on policy implementation 4.1 Introduction 34 4.2 Rationale for 11 official languages 35 4.3 The politics of parent choices 36 4.4 Myths about African languages 36 4.5 Conclusion 45

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Chapter 5 Mutual inter-comprehensibility: A case against the number of African languages 47 5.1 Introduction 47 5.2 Naturalised ‘speaking in tongues’ 47 5.3 Mutual inter-comprehensibility and early standardization in Africa 48 5.4 Mutual inter-comprehensibility studies 49 5.5 Sotho languages 50 5.6 Experiential mutual inter-comprehensibility 53 5.6.1 The experiment 53 5.7 Reading proficiencies: A measure of transliteracy 56 5.8 Conclusion 62 Chapter 6 Conversation analyses and high order thinking: A case for harmonization 63 6.1 Introduction 63 6.2 Meaning making between socially differentiated languages 63 6.3 Focus group conversations 65 6.3.1 Bi-variety discourse patterns 65 6.3.2 Three-language interaction: Conversational repairs 6.3.3 Three-language interaction: Mutual inter-comprehensibility 78 6.4 Cognitively demanding task 79 6.5 Expanded social identities 82 6.6 Conclusion 82

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Chapter 7 Beyond boundaries to full linguistic repertoires 83 7.1 Introduction 83 7.2 Inbound and outbound village mobility 83 7.3 Post-apartheid mobility- reintegration 85 7.4 Translocal and transnational mobilities 86 7.5 From tsotsitaal and iscamtho to kasi-taal 87 7.6 Translanguaging practices 88 7.7 Kasi-taal research 89 7.8 Kasi-taal expressions 92 7.9 Leaking boundaries 98 7.10 Conclusion 100 Chapter 8 Sankofa, decolonization and shifting multilingual lenses 102 8.1 Introduction 102 8.2 Temporal complexity: Looking back to fetch 102 8.3 Ubuntu and pre-colonial African multilingualism 104 8.4 Colonization and the scramble for Africa 107 8.5 Monolingual and epistemological biases 109 8.6 Shifting lenses: Developing culture-based alternative theories 109 8.7 Conclusion 110 Chapter 9 Ubuntu translanguaging: Implications for language policy and education 111 9.1 Introduction 111 9.2 Reflecting on constitutional provisions 111 9.3 Neo-apartheid practices and unequal access to literacy 9.4 Ubuntu translanguaging model 113 9.5 Ubuntu translanguaging pedagogy 116 9.6 Multilingual policy developments 120 9.7 The speaker and the hearer in multilingualism 121 9.8 Ubuntu informed language-in education policy 123 9.9 Conclusion 124

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Chapter 10 Not eleven languages: Harmonizing and translanguaging in concert 126 10.1 Introduction 126 10.2 The 11 language policy paradox 126 10.3 A horizontal angle to multilingual policies 129 10.4 Disrupting old boundaries and re-creating new ones 130 10.5 Specific policy recommendations 131 10.6 Conclusion 132 References Index

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Chapter 1 African multilingualism re-defined: ‘I am because you are’ So let me begin . . .. I am an African I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the desserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas, and the ever changing seasons that define the face of our native land . . .. I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me. But it is also constitutes a tribute to our loss of vanity that we could, despite the temptation to treat ourselves as an exceptional fragment of humanity, draw on the accumulated experience and wisdom of all humankind to define for ourselves what we want to be. I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa. The pain of the violent conflict that the peoples of Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, Burundi and Algeria is a pain I also bear . . . (Excerpt from a speech entitled I am an African by Thabo Mbeki, 1996)

1.1 Introduction Sub-Saharan Africa is widely known for its linguistic complexity with the number of languages estimated at 1500–2000 (Bamgbose, 2000, 2015). If we accept this estimation, it would mean that the socially named languages in the region constitute about 30% of the world spoken languages in a sub-continent that makes 13% of the world’s population. While these figures are generally used often by linguistics and educationists globally to define the African linguistic composition, African scholars have consistently refuted these views, arguing that these numbers were inflated by the missionary linguists in the 1800 and that they conveniently served the colonial agenda of divide and rule (e.g., Alexander, 1989; Prah 2008; Makoni; 2003; Makalela, 2005). The debate on the number of African languages reflects an ideological contest between external experts who view the region from a fragmented and separatist perspective that is loosely connected to a misinterpretation of the “tower of the babel” Biblical story (Mazrui and Mazrui 1998, Mazrui, 1980) and, on the other hand, internal experts who articulate interconnectedness of language varieties under the notions of mutual intelligibility and translanguaging. The Centre for Advanced Studies of an African Society (CASAS) has promoted the latter view with its ground-breaking findings that Subhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9781614515067-001

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Chapter 1 African multilingualism re-defined: ‘I am because you are’

Saharan Africa has about 12 major languages spoken as first or additional languages. To date, the separationist perspective remains a dominant viewpoint that saw consistent imposition (colonial period) and choice (post-colonial period) of exogenous languages in various language policy guises to circumvent ‘too many incomprehensible tongues’ for the practicalities of nation building, education, politics and the media. This chapter provides and overview of African multilingualism defined from ontological positions of being an African.

1.2 Ubuntu: I am an African So let us begin. What has not yet been fully explored in the debate on the number of languages is the reinterpretation of the nature of languages within the 21st Century scholarship and dynamic sociolinguistic realities that define the identity of being an African (Mbeki, 2005). Since the dawn of the new century, mobility of humans within and between nation states has increased and has broken the traditional geographical and linguistic boundaries of the post-modern age. The notions of complexity, multiplicity, diversity, and fluidity have become keywords to express linguistic repertoires, individual multilingualism with fluid boundaries. When framed in this light, key questions remain on how one makes sense of self and of the world through a repertoire. This dual-sense making is anchored by one’s nature of being and a perspective of the world that is embedded in cultural constructs. The excerpt entitled “I am an African” is from a speech by the then deputy President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki at the adoption of the Republic of South Africa’s Constitution Bill that accorded 11 official languages an official status on the 8 May1996 in Cape Town. Thabo Mbeki, like many Africans, realizes the complexities of being an African with multiple layers of languages, cultures, ethnicities and ideologies that are intricately tied to the sense of being. He relates his deep connections with the myriad of natural habitat, human beings, the fauna, the flora and how their interwoven nature completes his being. Further in this speech, Thabo Mbeki also states that his being has expanded to accommodate European immigrants irrespective of their horrible deed of cultural, economic, political and social violence that was meted out against his African people. This violence is reflected in systematic exclusion of African languages as a way of assimilating Black South Africans into the Dutch and the English cultures for a period of at least 300 (Makalela, 2005). In the post-independent South Africa, which began with the release of Nelson Mandela from the Robben Island Prison on 11 February 1990, however, the flexibility and plural nature of Mbeki’s being is able to bring together diametrically opposed ideologies to

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harmony and social cohesion under the mantra,“ I am an African”. Beyond this, the speech reminds us that South Africa as a nation state is also intricately connected to other African sister countries, including those that had civil strife that left indelible pains on their citizens. Here we read compassion and unity in pain, in beauty and ideology, which are expressed cogently in the identity of being an African. Thabo Mbeki, also known for pioneering African renaissance and unity of Africa reflects on the harmony of existence of I am because you are, a locus of plurality, and non-conflictual multiplicity which define the essence of being an African. This is an epistemological orientation of a totality that is flexible, versatile, and unbounded. How then can Africans seize their nature of linguistic diversity to become who they really are in the face of a globalized world? To understand language and cultural diversity in South Africa as a microcosm of global multilingualism, the idea of non-conflictual difference in languages needs exploration in the face of the orthodox ideology of oneness and the global monolingual bias, which challenge these social and linguistic fluidities embodied by the African experience. For many speakers of African languages, it is important to look into the selfdefinition of “I am an African.” As understood from the quote above, “I am an African” is a statement of plurality, embodying a plural logic of interconnectedness between one’s environment, nature of being, and ways of knowing, which are all central to sense making. We read “I am an African” in conjunction with the cultural construct of ubuntu, which is best expressed in the phrasings “I am because you are” and “you are because I am.” This self-definition embeds an individual as an integrated part of the whole explains “unboundedness” and “embeddedness” of language systems in people’s everyday ways of meaning making and making sense of the world. Ubuntu represents an African worldview and a cosmic order where an individual is incomplete without the other. There is an integration of “I” and “we” to show how individuality and collectivism co-exist in a shared identity space. Mbiti explores the notion of ubuntu more explicitly as follows: Only in terms of other people does the individual become conscious of his own being, his own duties, his privileges and responsibilities towards himself and other people . . .. Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.” This is a cardinal point in the understanding of the African view of man. (Mbiti, 1969, p. 106)

Mbiti here instructs us to see the individual as an integrated part of the collective and that it is within the collective that the individual thrives. The collective is, similarly, bound in an inextricable relation with the individual. Elsewhere I refer to this matrix as infinite and transversal relations of dependency (Makalela

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Chapter 1 African multilingualism re-defined: ‘I am because you are’

2018a, 2019). While related to other notions of humanness in both the Global North and South, there is something fundamentally variant about ubuntu. BrockUtne and Lwaitama (2010) aptly explain that it cannot be easily explained in Western language and thought. When one says “O na le botho” meaning you have ubuntu, it means one is generous, hospitable, friendly, caring and compassionate. This is inclusive of the whole ecosystem of life involving one’s relationship with both animate and inanimate objects. It is in this connection that the communal and territorial expression of African humanism in ubuntu and in Mbeki’s “I am an African” sits at odds with the foregrounded individualism of the West represented by the phrase: “I think, therefore I am” (Brock-Utne and Lwaitama, 2010). The complex intersection between the I and the We in ubuntu shows a dynamic coalescence of the collective and individual identities: We becomes the I and then the I becomes the We while their separatism is possible and strengthened simultaneously. As will be discussed later, wholeness as different from differentiation of elements into discrete units is a defining factor to understand African multilingualism- where languages do not exist in isolation from one another. It is useful to note criticisms from various scholars in so far as ubuntu is concerned. Whereas there is a general observation that Ubuntu is a way of life for speakers of Bantu language family in Sub-Saharan Africa, a number of scholars critiqued it as a tool that is mythologized and essentialised construct (Blackenberg,1999; Tomaselli, 2018). Others argue that it denies individuality; it fosters conformity, and it is decontextualized (Binsbergen, 2001). They also see it as a revivalist movement for an idea that has lost relevance in contemporary societies. In their well cited publication, “ubuntu is dead”, Matolino and Kwindigwi (2013) show that ubuntu is obsolete for contemporary African societies that are large and differentiated as it was originally applicable to smaller communities. They use examples of high levels of violence in contemporary African societies to make a case that ubuntu, as a moral compass, is dead. However, these criticisms seem to accord it an utopian world view of perfectionism, which cannot be claimed of any value systems, theory or philosophy. Secondly, the infinite relations of dependency between the individual and the collective is complex, but these cardinal points are not mutually exclusive. Third, it is instructive to note that speakers of Bantu languages practise ubuntu (of the speakers of ntu languages) as their cultural competence and natural habits rooted in their languages as well as the way they interact with the world around them. It is in this connection that the assumptions about ubuntu being mythologized do not find resonance with the actual experience of the people (Makalela, 2019). Ubuntu, on the contrary, finds full expression in the “I am an African” speech introduced above.

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Equally of significance is that ubuntu can be understood within various geopolitical contexts. Most notably, the Latin American philosophy of Buen Vivir (Walsh, 2018) also emphasises community-well being, reciprocity and solidarity with Mother Earth. In Ecuador, for example, Buen Vivir has become a policy governing the country’s socio-economic transformation agenda despite implementational limitations by the state (Williford, 2018). Whereas broader notions such as altruism and humanness are inherently human and are cutting across a wider spectrum of both the Global North and South, the notion of ubuntu holds something unique that it cannot be generalised and interpreted via Western thought and language. It offers us an indigenous lens to deconstruct Western perspectives of language and to reframe our research methods (Severo and Makoni, 2019) and the integrated nature of language (Makoni and Severo, 2017) from the Global South epistemologies.

1.3 The constitution: Beyond the “one nation-one language” ideology After more than 300 years of language war and the systematic exclusion of indigenous African languages a new socio-linguistic epoch t sought to bring together people of different races, ethnicities and religions under a one “rainbow nation”. In order to end the language struggle that saw different forms if systematic exclusion of African languages in public domains and to foster national unity among ethno-linguistically divided people, the South African Constitution accorded 11 languages an official status at its inception in 1996 (RSA,1996). Section 6 of the Constitution includes nine major indigenous African languages as well as Afrikaans and English, which were historically privileged as national official languages, as new official languages: Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, IsiNdebele, SiSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, English and Afrikaans (RSA, section 6. 2). In addition, the Constitution made specific provision for the development and use of African languages as follows: Recognizing the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous languages of our people, the state must take practical and positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of these languages. (RSA, section 6 (2))

Beyond this making a special preference for the indigenous African languages, the Constitutional provisions made way for the establishment of a parastatal language body, Pan South African Language Board (PANSALB), to carry out the following responsibilities:

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a) Promote, and create conditions for the development and use of (i) all official languages; (ii) Khoe, Nama and San languages (iii) sign language; b) Promote and ensure respect for(i) all languages commonly used for communities in South Africa, including German, Greek, Gujerati, Hindi, Portuguese, Tamil, Telegu and Urdu; and (ii) Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and other languages used for religious purposes in South Africa. (RSA, 1996, 6 (5)). What is evident here is that the constitution did not only provide the official status to African languages, it also accorded further measures to include almost all languages spoken in South Africa to include the minority languages of people who would typically fall under the category of migrants in the Western world. Languages such as German, Greek, Portuguese, and Hindi are given special treatment to cater for the needs of minority speakers irrespective of their place of origin. This is the group of migrants, including English and Afrikaans, that Mbeki says, “they still form a part of me”. Equally native languages of the Khoe, Nama and San as well as the Sign Language have spaces in the new socio-political dispensation. The mix of many languages is indicative of the typical nature of a collective African identity, which accommodates the local and global spheres at the same time and without contradiction. This broad embrace of multilingualism underscores globalization, which has allowed people to cross-over between languages and geographical boundaries to the extent that it has become increasingly difficult to tie mobile the 21 st Century people to space and time. Being an African, as in the words of Mbeki, means taking an inclusive approach, and having a plural vision of our changed spaces of self. Bloemmart’s (2013, 2017) sociolinguistics of mobility is instructive on the nature of language movement due to increased migration and intermarriages both within and between nation states. Apart from the obvious need to extend language rights and freedoms of all the people of South Africa and to build national unity in response to the history of ethno-linguistic and racial divisions, the 11 official language policy is indicative of the plural vision of being an African and the realization that nation states can no longer be defined through the lens of one nation-one language or the ancient European Enlightenment belief that one language is key to building national unity.

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1.4 Critiques: A divide and rule continuity Although the Constitutional commitments to 11 official languages, promotion of African languages, development of heritage languages and respect for ‘foreign’ languages were well received in most parts of the world, there were criticisms locally, most notably by the linguists, Sinfree Makoni (2003), Neville Alexander (2001), and Leketi Makalela (2005). The first criticism was that the constitution is too wide ranging and that practical implementation of the provisions might prove a daunting task. The second criticism was that the Constitution does not go far enough to address the language boundaries, which were used historically to divide and rule the local people. Alexander (2001), who proposed unification of African languages, observed that the Constitutional provisions have done so little to ensure that African children have epistemic access to the world through their own languages. Compared to English and Afrikaans mother tongue speakers who enjoy access to knowledge through their home languages or languages they understand, African children are perpetually set for failure since their languages are not used for learning and teaching beyond Grade 3. Through education, this language status reproduces an unjust and inequitable society that mirrors the new forms of colonial and apartheid periods. His response is mainly understood from the language in education policy statement that “every child has the right to be taught in any language of their choice where this is reasonably practicable”. From this perspective, the Constitution left caveats and noncommittal postures that give way for the continuation of social inequalities. Makoni (2003) critiqued the Constitution that the stated linguistic codes repackage the missionary linguists’ “errors” that exaggerated the numerical count of the indigenous languages. Using the notion of “disinvention”, he states that the South African Constitution language policy creates a self-serving amnesia by encouraging Africans to “unremember” the historical and material contexts, which the so-called African languages were invented or cobbled together. (Makoni, 2003, p.132)

This critique points to the fact that the Constitution does not make reference whatsoever to the key notion of unification of the arbitrarily divided indigenous languages. Makoni (2003, p.139) further argued that the policy should have specified only two or three African languages as official languages and explicitly made provisions for re-conceptualization of the so-called “language.” In other words, what is constituted as language in the constitution is defined from a Eurocentric separation of speech forms into discrete units. Makalela (2005) moved forward Makoni’s criticism by showing that the current divisions are artificial and argued for reconstruction of the languages to reflect the fluid and overlapping ways in which they are used in social spaces such as the Zion Christian Church

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Chapter 1 African multilingualism re-defined: ‘I am because you are’

gatherings. From this perspective, the constitution divided languages as autonomous structures that are separated into “boxes” (Makalela, 2015). Taken together, the Constitution has set a stage for a rainbow nation to emerge where the global citizen of the 21st century can thrive uninhibited. However, the fluid African character whose languages are an integrated sum of the whole in the context of being s embedded in the existence of others is missed. The latter view is the one that research in post-independent South Africa has not fully documented on language use among the “African” defined in Thabo Mbeki’s speech.

1.5 More than 25 years later In more than 25 years of the Constitutional commitments, attempts to implement multilingualism and use African languages in the high prestige positions have proved complex and hard to translate into concrete action. As a result, the old linguistic status quo is reproduced in the new socio-linguistic dispensation with traditionally privileged languages (i.e., Afrikaans and English) remaining the dominant languages of education, science, medicine, and official communication. Phaswana (2000, 2003), for example, reported that there had been no visible progress with regard to the use of African languages in the national Parliament. His study showed that language practices in parliamentary sessions still favour the two previously dominant languages, English and Afrikaans, while members of Parliament who are not communicatively confident in these languages often withhold their participation. There has also not been much progress in using the indigenous African languages in most public services like the banking system, the media and the job market (e.g., Kamwangamalu, 2001). For example, it was reported that the Department of Home Affairs was still unable to produce a birth certificate in IsiZulu while official forms are mainly reproduced in English and Afrikaans. More negative developments were noted regarding the use of African languages as the media of learning and teaching. Indigenous African languages have not yet been used as the media of instruction beyond Grade 4 (Makalela, 2018a, b). By default, the public schools still follow the missionary designed subtractive bilingualism program, which is a deficit model that forces learners to make a sudden transfer from their home languages to English at Grade 4 level. Similarly, the only high school learners who are assessed in the national examination through their home languages, to date (2021), are Afrikaans and English mother tongue speakers. This programme of teaching African language speaking children in languages they do not understand has been continued in the post-

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Apartheid era despite volumes of research documenting its association with high failure and attrition rates in primary and secondary schools (Brock-Utne, 2000; Heugh, 2014; Makalela, 2018b; Mkhize, 2018). Taken together, these expositions show that the Constitutional commitments to promote the use of African languages have not been upheld. It is in this context that Kamwangamalu (2000) succinctly observes: “if any thing has changed at all, it is that English has gained more territory and political clout than Afrikaans” (p.129).

1.6 Frames of languages: Leaking out of boxes Increased mobility of people within and across the nation states has let poststructuralist scholars to question the validity of rigid linguistic boundaries and has reshaped the way we think about language. Among other conceptual frames, the sociolinguistics of mobility (e.g. Rheindorf & Wodak (2020); Hickey (2019) and translanguaging (e.g. Garcia, 2019; Garcia and Kleyn, 2019; García and Wei 2014) show that languages are always in state of flux and that they interface and embed into each other as and when multilingual speakers make meaning. The sociolinguistic of mobility was popularised by Blommaert (2010, 2017) when referring to the view that migration of people from one geographical area to another creates a linguistic landscape where languages become fluid, unstable, mobile and versatile. According to Blommaert (2017) and Trudgill (2010) language is no longer something that sits in fixed, specific a physical position or place, but it is a mobile entity that is forever moving continually. Because of this, human identities are more complex than are the narrow, restricted and limited thinking of them in terms of one language (Blackledge and Creese, 2017). Blackledge and Creese (2017) affirm that as a people of the 21st C, we have witnessed unprecedented traffic of people, linguistic and meaning-making asserts in space and time- something suggesting that immigration, globalization and mobility are at their peak (Trudgill, 2010; Pennycook, 2017). Translanguaging, on the other hand, refers to fluid use of languages when multilingual speakers are involved in events of meaning making. In this state of overlaps, there is a shift in conceptualizing language as a static entity to viewing is as a process through the verb, languaging. When speakers engage in meaning making discourses, they use all semiotic resources that cuts across a wide array of socially named languages. They translanguage (Garcia, 2009; Creese and Blackledge, 2017). The original use of the word translanguage was first used in Welsh ‘transiwuethu’ by Cen Williams (Baker, 2011), which meant pedagogical and intentional exchange of the languages of input and output to create balanced bilingual children in Welsh and English. The languaging

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Chapter 1 African multilingualism re-defined: ‘I am because you are’

framework endorses the continuous state of language, which should be seen in progress rather than as a fixed entity that is capable of being placed in a separate box. Garcia (2011) explains this view of the embeddedness of languages when she uses the gardening metaphor. Language use in the 21st century is like flowers from different plots that overlap into one another. Unlike the gardens of the 20th century, the overlaps are a necessary thread that is not pruned or cut. Garcia (2009) extended translanguaging use to include multiple modes and complex mobility of languages in a non-linear but complementary manner as a representation of how bi/multilingual students make meaning and affirm who they are. This reorientation of bi/multilingualism goes beyond traditional notions of bilingualism such as immersion programmes. Beyond this conception, use of translanguaging Li Wei (2011; Li Wei and Lin, 2019) had cognitive advantages in what is called ‘translanguaging space’ and the approach by Creese and Blackledge (2011) showed the social advantages in affirming the identity positions of multilingual learners in the British complementary schools. Gravitation from languages as structures challenged the validity of language boundaries in favour of versatile, fluid and overlapping use of linguistic repertoires. Consequently, the movement towards what people do with the linguistic resources they possess meant that a shift from the noun language (reified object) to the verb languaging (meaning making activity). According to Kleyn and Garcia (2019), the prefix “trans” indexes a transformation of language structures by going beyond them. Yet moving beyond the structures does not mean that these do not exist socio-culturally (i.e., what the society values and names). They who posit that: The line between the important socio-cultural constructions that are separate named languages and the unitary language system of human beings need to be firmly drawn. (P. 79)

In South Africa, Makalela (2013) described translanguaging in the context of a local lingua franca called kasi-taal, which was followed by Madiba (2014) and Makalela (2014) who both addressed learning and teaching in higher education institutions. More recently, translanguaging took a human view where the cultural construct of ubuntu referred to as ubuntu translanguaging (Makalela; 2016, 2018b). As already mentioned above, ubuntu is an African value system about the interconnectedness of human beings. It is best expressed in the saying: motho ke motho ka batho, which translates into “I am because you are; because you are therefore I am.” The basic tenet of ubuntu translaguaging is its paradox found in the saying: I am because you are; you are because I am. The orchestra of “I” and “we” offers a window through which individuality and collectivism co-exist in a shared identity space. Because this way of being and making sense of the

1.6 Frames of languages: Leaking out of boxes

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work predates colonialism, it is a cultural anchor from which African multilingualism is theorized as ubuntu translanguaging to account for disruption of boundaries while at the same time recreating new discursive ones (Makalela 2016, 2018b, 2019). It is viewed a comprehensive account of meaning-focused assertion where no one language is complete without the other. In sociolinguistic spaces like this, it is possible to accept unboundedness, non-linearity and fuzziness of everyday ways of communicating and reject strict isolation of languages into ‘boxes’ while at the same time recognizing the socially named languages (Makalela, 2015). This is in tandem with the plural African defined by Mbeki and the management of language systems that valorize integration instead of normalizing “multiple monolingualisms” (Makalela, 2014) as presented in the Constitution. We note some of the criticisms that have been levelled against translanguaging in the recent past. One of these is the unintended consequences of bringing a powerful language such as English in the same classroom as a local African language. They include the view that more powerful languages tend to assimilate the marginalized languages. This view harbours purist notions of language that the minority languages will remain static and immune to evolution. While it is plausible that a powerful language may subsume the less powerful ones, leaving less powerful languages in isolation can equally be detrimental to its natural evolution. The classroom space is a third space to renegotiate power and eventually allow for multiple voices in position of prestige that were historically reserved for the dominate languages. Translanguaging provides affordances for disruption of dominance and recreation of a new negotiated new order. The second critique of translanguaging is that it is contradictory in that it pushes against boundaries while the concept of language is still used within the translanguaging discourse. This language-no language paradox brought about debates on whether translanguaging is a unitary system or differentiated system in the speakers’ cognitive domains. Otheguy, Garcia and Reid (2015, 2017) showed that translanguaging implicates a unitary system especially when speakers are involved in a meaning making process while McSwain’s (2017) view is that the languages are differentiated; ie., multiple languages that stay discrete, even if they are used simultaneously. Makalela (2019) showed that these divergent views can be explained from ubuntu translanguaging where entities are not mutually exclusive as in the “I” and the “We”. Adaptation of Noam Chomsky’s original framing of languages as ‘internal’ and ‘external’ to an individual is useful. In this sense the internal language (I-language) of the speaker follows a unitary system as a repertoire applied in meaning making where speakers are not conscious of the linguistic boundaries. This is a speaker orientation view. On the other hand, at the moment of speech, differences between languages can be perceived by the hearer alongside the socially named language (E-language) structures. The co-

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Chapter 1 African multilingualism re-defined: ‘I am because you are’

existence of the speaker and hearer viewpoints is what constitutes the translanguaging paradox in the same way that the co-existence and simultaneous separateness of individuality and collectivism is found in the logic of Ubuntu. While all these engagements on translanguaging and ubuntu provide snapshots to understand the complexity of multilingualism, they do not imply that the bottom line should be neglected: monolingual bias in contemporary classrooms. Ubuntu translanguaging thus poses as a construct useful to decolonize one-ness ideology and disrupt monolingualism.

1.7 Conclusion In this chapter we explored the plural notion of being an African as encapsulated in Thabo Mbeki’s well-known speech at the official adoption of South Africa’s Constitution that elevated indigenous African languages to an official status. Not only was South Africa tasked with promotion of the indigenous languages for parity of esteem with previously advantaged languages, English and Afrikaans, it was also required to develop heritage and sign languages and embrace global languages such as German, Hindi and Greek. I averred that this plural way of thinking is consistent with the cosmological expansion of being: I am because you are, which is a locus of continuity and co-existence in the local ubuntu. While attempts to action the constitutional commitments started, we observe that in the 20 years of democracy, monoglot ideologies stalled progress on linguistic diversity. South Africa not being alone in this European enlightenment sphere, there is a need to change frameworks and re-thinking languages not as fixed and autonomous entities, but rather as a continuum that is best articulated by the sea waves, which are dialogically embedded into one another in the motion of discontinuous continuity- a theme that is developed in the next chapters.

Chapter 2 History of language war and its sociolinguistic output Language is like life. There is an aspiration for order, for control, for possession, driven by fear of the unknown, of the powers and sources of evil. But there is always the reality that language, like life, cannot be controlled. Language, like life, is bigger than any one of us. We can go through language, like life, we can be with language, like life, we can use it, but we cannot control it. We can try to create all kinds of controlling devices- rules, regulations, laws, correctness, categories, policies, impositions; in life, we also create ceremonies, anniversaries, prayers, ritual, insurances, and other devices, all through the desire to impose order; but it does not work. (Shohamy, 2006: 165)

2.1 Introduction Language policy makers and planners are perpetually involved in a state of language control for administrative purposes. As they do this however, the very nature of language is compromised through plans for rigid and bounded use in the real world. The extract above reflects the orthodox language policy views that have traditionally attempted to treat languages as isolated units in order to guard against what was perceived as ‘cross-contamination between these languages’. In order to manage languages, traditional views still hold that they should be placed in boxes, isolated from one another. Many scholars have observed that the isolationist treatment of languages is imbued by the idealism of European nationalism since the enlightenment period where languages were used to exclude and alienate others (Makalela, 2015; Ricento and Hornberger, 1996; Shohamy, 2006). This type of language separation and ‘policing’ was predominant in achieving the one nation-one language ideology that permeated the majority thinking in Europe in the 1820s, especially as seen in the influential works of Von Humboldt (Ricento, 2000: 198; see also Makalela, 2014, 2016). In this chapter we discuss this ideology and how it was carried over into African contexts through processes of colonization and assimilation.

2.2 The burden of Enlightenment period The Enlightenment period formed nation states formed in Europe and pursued an ideology of oneness that permeated the thinking to the extent that the education https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614515067-002

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Chapter 2 History of language war and its sociolinguistic output

systems also restricted use of more than one language in the classrooms (Ricento, 2000; Makalela, 2018a). These controlling mechanisms were a reaction to the medieval period where Europe was plunged into civil wars that were caused by invasions by outsiders- the foreigners. Notably, the Romans suffered a series of attacks from foreigners and so were the British from the Normans, among others. The fear of the foreigner, when framed in this light, created a need to form nation states, to create national boundaries based on language differences as a measure of control to fix and stabilize sovereign nations. In the 21st C, there are still strong views about language protection and fear that standards of one language might be contaminated by of words, phrases from other languages. Equally, the ancient view that languages using more than one language creates mental confusion (Baker 2011) is still the most dominant view in the schooling sector. The extract above shows that there are constant attempts to put control measures on life and on language due to monolingual orientations. We gather that a language controlling language is as futile n exercise as controlling life. Shohamy (2006) observes that any form of linguistic control “does not work” (p. 165). To understand this control mechanism, it is instructive to recall the notions of ‘ipseity’ (oness) from the Enlightenment period and how nation-building became a dominant factor in choosing foreign languages over the indigenous ones in colonial and post-colonial Africa. In particular, one-ness brought about by one European language was considered a predictor of civilization in the colonial states while plurality was associated with chaos and disorder in nation states.

2.3 Language wars and control in South Africa South Africa is a typical country where attempts to control and put boundaries between people and their languages can be discerned throughout its successive regimes that struggled over political, economic and cultural power. To understand the language ‘war’ in South Africa, an overview of the long history of language war that can be traced over a more than 300 years period since the arrival the Dutch settlers in 1652 is instructive. Since this early settlement of Europeans in the country, the language practices and policies have always been riddled with contractions and linguistic discrimination that is characterized by (a) exclusive use of exogenous European languages, (b) marginal use of indigenous African languages in high prestige positions of power, (c) artificial separation within African languages and (d) separation between African languages and English and Afrikaans (e.g., Makalela, 2005). We now turn to the historical periods, which characterized the language struggle.

2.4 In the beginning: Languages without history?

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The South African language struggle can be classified under five broad historical themes in the order discussed below: (a) the arrival of the Dutch settlers in 1652, (b) the invasion of the English in 1795, (c) Afrikaner nationalism in 1925 and endorsement of Apartheid policy in 1948, (d) the 1976 Soweto Students Uprising and (e) the 1994 democratization period that resulted in the multilingual policy of 1996 (see also Kamwangamalu, 2001; Makalela 2005). All these periods uncover the complex language struggle in ways that show concerted efforts to control language use. Whereas there are many alternative explanations for this language struggle, but for our purpose it is important to stress how the ideology of oneness and European nationalist expansion of their oneness into the hinterlands defined negative views on multiligualism. Let’s examine how each of these historical processes affected the sociolinguistic outputs of South Africa.

2.4 In the beginning: Languages without history? The history of South African languages stretches as far back as 120 000 years ago when the first indigenous people –the Khoe and the San- settled in the country. The second history of settlement is with regard to speakers of Bantu language who are said to have settled in South Africa around 600BC. Records of their language history, use and writing systems are virtually unknown and undocumented in the literature. Evidence suggests that the records were purposefully omitted by the foreign anthropologists and linguists who were comfortable with the story that “ peoples of Africa have not yet risen to the stage of education which can produce written records of important events or institutions” (Raum, 1993: 3). We are however able to glean from folklore, art, and rock paintings and engravings of the indigenous people that there were greater forms of literacy, trade of minerals, architecture and civilization found in the Zimbabwes of the Emperor Monomotapa whose empire stretched over South Africa and other Southern African States (Makalela, 2005, 2018b). I have observed elsewhere (Makalela, 2005, 2018a) that individualization of properties like cattle’s, the making of trademarks, drawing of maps, and recording of long messages by means of tallies are sufficient evidence that writing systems like pictographs and ideographs had already evolved by the time Africans came into contact with the Europeans. This means that . . . the natives were able to record subjects apparently even of abstract nature, by means of incisions and to decipher them later, developing in conversation the subject thus recorded by reference to the tally. (Raum, 1993:11)

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Outside of literacy practices, complex communication between people of different ethnic groupings suggests mutual intercomprehensibility of the languages used. The Khoe and the San who were hunters and guardsmen, respectively, shared resources and collaborated on complex social systems, which suggest a linguistic interaction that was not hampered by difference. The Bantu language groups have also had a history of intermarriage and cross ethnic settlements for a period of about 1000 years before they came into contact with Europeans. It is in this connection that “ to describe the status of African languages before Western colonialism, we can do so accurately if the notion of harmony and coexistence is empathized” (Makalela, 2005). The current linguistic map of South Africa suggests that the Nguni group were the earlier as they became the first to get into contact with the Khoe and San people. Within these groups, IsiXhosa shows more linguistic resemblances with the Khoe-San languages, characterized by clicks. IsiZulu has fewer clicks than isiXhosa, followed by SiSwati and isiNdebele. This is indicative of patterns of speech . . . the Sotho group also shows a pattern of contact. Sesotho had closer contact with isiXhosa and relatively small contact with the Khoe-San languages compared to its two sister varieties: Sepedi and Sestswana. As will be seen later, the map is far more complex than described here due to constant mobility and settlement spaces. We are able to evoke the notion of spatiotemporal complexes as a feature defining multilingualism before the arrival of the European settlers in South Africa. An important point to highlight is that communication and transmission of knowledge happened through language varieties spoken and understood across a wider spectrum of the current etholinguistic divides. Basil Davidson expertly advise us about African tribalism that predates European nationalism as follows: In a large historical sense tribalism has been used to express the solidarity and common loyalties of people who share among themselves a country or a culture. In this important sense, tribalism in Africa or anywhere else has always existed and has often been the force for good, a force creating a civil society dependent on law as and the rule of law (P. 11).

In the Davidson sense, African tribalism was not a backward way of belonging as seen through the Euro lens. Often misconstrued, tribalism had negative connotations that include fighting, constant attacks and complete disorder that characterized the dark ages of the medieval period. As stated above, the Emperor Monomotapa had a large landscape that included 5 Southern African countries of the present day: Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia and Botswana. This is a plural sense of common loyalties and solidarity among a people who shared culture and language varieties that were mutually inter-comprehensible. Volumes of work from CASAS research

2.5 The Dutch settlers

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reveal the common thread that cuts across languages that were in the Monomotapa empire or what is currently referred to as Southern Africa today.

2.5 The Dutch settlers The scramble for Africa, which began with the European post-renaissance era, saw the Dutch settling in South Africa in 1652. At this time, Europeans had started voyages of discoveries into many parts of the world, with trade going more into East Asia. First described by Kamwangamalu (2001), I describe the arrival of the Dutch settlers in South Africa as representing a colonial period that is best characterized as Dutchification (Makalela 2005). With this characterization, we are able to capture the systematic efforts to change cultural and linguistic landscape of the newly founded colony where the ultimate sociolinguistic outputs would look like Dutch. Here we are referring to the desire to change the local people to speak and behave like the Dutch. It is axiomatic that the Dutch settlers arrived in the Cape Colony through the Dutch East Indian Company on Table Bay on April 6, 1652. The settlers wanted to use the Cape region as their refreshment station and as a temporary stoppage area on their way to India where they wanted to trade for food spices. Due to lack of fresh vegetables and fruit, the voyagers were attacked by sicknesses such as scurvy, which forced them to seek alternative support strategies of survival. Troup (1972) presents the initial mission of the Dutch as follows: Some five years after the wreck of the Harlem and 154 years after Vasco da Gama’s voyage, Jan van Riebeeck, a tough, much traveled and very able ship’s surgeon, set from Holland with three small ships, Goede Hoep, the Dramedaris and the Reiger, to found at the Cape “a depot of provisions,” to enable ships of the company to refresh themselves with the vegetables, meat, water, and other necessities, by which means the sick on board may be restored to health. (Troup, 1972, p.40)

In spite of the mission to settle temporarily at the Cape, the Dutch eventually settled there permanently and moved inland. As they moved further inland, they first clashed with the Khoe and San people and later with the Bantu speaking communities who had settled mainly in the upper regions. The Dutch were not interested in learning the languages of the indigenous people. Instead, they used interpreters to communicate with the people who later became slaves. The Khoe and San languages were disregarded and castigated as the “clucking of turkeys” (Alexander, 1989, p.21). According to Troup (1972), the settlers had a condescending attitude toward the San languages because they had a “small vocabulary and strange clicks” (p.22). As a result, the languages of the indigenous people were denigrated, deemed inferior to be learned and used for official communication between the Europeans and the Africans.

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The Dutch settlers had a further mission of changing and replacing the African social reality with a foreign culture and ideology. To this end, they imposed their own language on the local people and consequently used it as the language of learning and teaching in the European modelled schools. Language was, in this connection, enforced as a tool of re-socialization (see Alexander, 1989, 1995). According to Phaswana (2000), there were other languages of the Cape such as Portuguese and Malay-Portuguese. The former was spoken by slaves from Angola, Mozambique, and Madagascar, who were brought to the Cape by Portuguese settlers as indentured slaves. The latter came from Malaysia as indentured slaves who were used for cheap labour in the “founded” refreshment station. Because the languages of the slaves began to threaten Dutch as the sole dominant language of the Cape, the Dutch settlers decreed the use of “Dutch only” in all official domains. This period marks the first known language policy in South Africa.

2.6 Anglicization The second phase is the Anglicization period that involved the invasion of the English settlers for the first time in 1795 and secondly in 1802. It was in the second invasion that the English were vigorously engaged in the Anglicization of the country where the English language was enforced as the language of use in the government business and other public spheres like education. In order to succeed in spreading the use of English throughout the country, the English sought to reduce Dutch, which had been the sole official language since 1652, in all spheres of life (Kloss, 1978). In this connection, language was also used as an ideological tool to entrench the Anglicization mission sanctioned under the auspices of the British imperialism that targeted African colonies for its expansion. Among other factors, competition for linguistic domination between the two colonizing groups saw a settler-settler clash between the Dutch and British that resulted in the AngloBoer War, which lasted from 1889 to1902. What is unique about this Dutch-British rivalry for domination is that both colonizing groups had a common mission that had far-reaching linguistic implication for the indigenous languages, i.e., deAfricanization through marginalization of the indigenous African languages (see Kamwangamalu, 1997; Heugh, 2002; Malherbe, 1977). These expositions reveal that indigenous African languages were consistently inhibited as means of expression in government, business, and educational affairs from the 17th century to the turn of the 20th century due to political control based on colonialism. The role of missionary linguists in the 19th century was of linguistic importance in ways that provide a context for the harmonization proposal. The missionaries were the first to create the orthographies of indigenous African languages because

2.7 The ‘Union’ of South Africa

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they wanted to Christianize the natives and to translate the Bible into these languages. According to Doke (1993), “The period concerning about 1830 down to the present day became a period of intensive monograph study of the Bantu languages, a period in which almost all the research and recording work was done by the missionaries” (p. 34). These missionaries include Isaac Hughes (1789–1870), and Andrew Spaarman (1747–1820) who respectively developed Setswana and IsiXhosa (called “Kafir language” at that time). According to Miti (2002), IsiXhosa and Setswana were the first Southern African languages that were reduced to writing by the missionaries. IsiXhosa was put to writing in 1826 by the missionaries from the Glasgow mission who used the English alphabet while Setswana orthography was developed in 1837 by James Archbell in 1841 by the French, Eugene Casalis, and in 1858 by David Livingstone (Miti, 2002). IsiZulu, which is a sister variety of isiXhosa, was developed by American missionaries in 1849; Sepedi – a sister variety of Setswana- was put to writing by the German Lutheran missionaries. This brief history reveals that indigenous languages were reduced to writing by non-mother tongue speakers of European origin who, according to Banda (2002), had no knowledge of the history and relationship that existed between the languages. This led to elevation of dialects of the same language to the status of fully-fledged languages with orthographies that coincided with the missionaries’ mother tongues. Banda (2002) contends that the European colonialists and missionaries treated African sounds as if they were from a European phonetic system. A prototypical example of orthographic “disinvention” (Makoni, 2003) can be seen with different orthographies of Sesotho dialect. Sesotho of Lesotho and Sesotho of Free State to date still have different orthographies even though they are the same dialect of the Sotho language. For many linguists (e.g., Mansour, 1993), missionaries have exaggerated the number of actual languages spoken today in South Africa. Arguments for harmonization of differentiated orthographic representations and spelling systems are rooted in this context of exaggerated multilingualism, which resulted in a proliferation of many indigenous languages (Prah, 2001, Alexander, 1989).

2.7 The ‘Union’ of South Africa In 1910, South Africa signed a union treaty as a way to quell war that had claimed many lives between 1899–1902. Another reason for the treaty was the realization that the Afrikaners (White Africans who were Dutch descendants) had grown in numbers and were uniting under a movement that was referred to as the Afrikaner boere-bond and the Black Africans were also uniting against colonialism and threatened the power and dominance of both the Dutch and the British. Beyond

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Chapter 2 History of language war and its sociolinguistic output

these external factors, it was also increasingly becoming difficult for the British to stay in the Cape and Natal colonies, without movement and expansion of trade in the upper colonies: Orange Free State and Transvaal, which had more opportunities for mining in places such as Johannesburg. The political union was expanded to cultural ‘union’ where the Dutch and English were considered official languages of the republic. The state constitution decreed bilingualism as follows: Both the English and Dutch languages shall be official languages of the Union and shall be treated on a footing of equality and possess and enjoy freedom, rights and privileges (Hill, 2009: 8)

It is worth noting that this national language policy was short-lived as it ignored the growing number of Afrikaans mother tongue speakers (mainly Dutchdescendants who spoke a creole that included Dutch, Malay, and Khoe and San languages) who were no longer comfortable with Dutch as their home language. Politically, the Afrikaners needed self-determination and then built up a protest movement that promoted the development of Afrikaans as a language in its own right. It was also shortly after the Union of South Africa that the African National Congress (ANC) was formed to represent the cultural and political aspirations of Black people who were conspicuously excluded from the union. Hartshorne (1987) remind us that it was during the First World War (1914–1919) when Afrikaans started replacing Dutch as the official language. Afrikaans then gradually substituted Dutch and it was duly developed and recognized under Hertzog’s leadership in 1925 (Hartshorne, 1987). Indigenous African languages, on the other hand, were not developed for education purposes save for the orthographic inscriptions made by the missionary linguists as early as 1824. Here, the goal of the missionary linguists was to Christianize the local people through development of literacy in reading and translating the Bible. The linguistic outcome of the Union of South Africa was that between the years 1918 and 1959 English-Afrikaans bilingual medium was used for learning and teaching. White schools were divided into either Afrikaans or English schools, with either of these languages used as the language of instruction and both of languages taught as subjects. The Missionary schools attended by Black learners, on the contrary, had a policy of learning through African home language for the first three years and transition into English medium instruction at grade 4. Afrikaans and English were taught as subjects in these schools. These racially segregated schools followed different bilingual programs where White children learned only White languages whereas Black children learned Afrikaans, English and their home language.

2.8 Afrikaner nationalism

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2.8 Afrikaner nationalism The third socio-historical phase in the language practices of South Africa is the Afrikanerization (see Kamwangamalu, 1997) movement that emerged in 1914 (Mbeki, 2005) and reached its peak in 1948 when the nationalist government took power and instituted Apartheid policies of separate development. When the formally known as “Union of South Africa” was declared in 1910, Dutch was used as a second official language side by side with English. The Afrikaners who spoke a Dutch creole, Afrikaans, protested against the bilingual official language system that excluded their own mother tongue. They insisted that their language should have official recognition until it was finally able to replace Dutch in 1925 as the second official language side by side with English. According to Marteens (1998) as quoted in Phaswana (2000), Afrikaans emerged as a result of slavemaster and slave-slave conversations, which were derogatorily referred to as “kitchen Dutch.” Over time, however, Afrikaans became a unifying symbol of nationalism among the Dutch descendants, and it was promoted and officially declared a fully-fledged official language above all the indigenous African languages. At the beginning of the official Apartheid policies in 1948, the National Party ensured that Afrikaans became a medium of learning and teaching, side by side with English, which still had its official status secured. Like their predecessors, the Afrikaners had a mission of reducing the domination of English in public spheres. But far beyond their battle against English, they wanted to reduce Africans to linguistic-tribal enclaves under the pretext of separate development ideology. Such linguistic tribalization was enforced in accord with the architect of Apartheid, Dr H. F Verwoerd’s “blue print of Apartheid” (Smitherman, 2000). Dr H. F Verwoerd decreed that “Africans who speak different languages must live in separate quarters” (Alexander, 1989, p. 21). Furthermore, a Group Areas Act was passed with the aim of teaching a Black child that “he was a foreigner when he [was] in White South Africa, or at best stateless; that equality with Europeans was not for him; that there was no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour” (Malherbe, 1977, p. 546). In order to teach Black children to feel that they were foreigners in South Africa, foreign languages were promoted at the expense of the indigenous languages. Systematic exclusion of indigenous languages meant that the indigenous majority population was reduced to the position of a social minority in their own country and that they would “enjoy” the same status as legal and illegal migrants in Europe (Alexander, 2001, p.9). Using the Bantustan homeland system, the Apartheid government embarked on exploiting the ethno-linguistic boundaries that had been arbitrarily drawn by the early missionary linguists (i.e., the nine indigenous languages) and entrenched

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Chapter 2 History of language war and its sociolinguistic output

dialects of the same language as different languages. Ten Bantustan homelands were created in accordance with each of the dialects that had been elevated to the status of languages by the missionaries as follows: (1) Lebowa (Sepedi) (2) Bophutatswana (Setswana), (3) Qwaqwa (Sesotho), (4) Kwa-Zulu (IsiZulu), (5) Kwa-Ndebele (IsiNdebele), (6) Kangwane (siSwati), (7) Transkei (IsiXhosa), (8) Ciskei (IsiXhosa), (9) Venda (Tshivenda), (10) Gazankulu (Xitsonga). It was only IsiXhosa that had two homelands that were divided by the Kei River (Ciskei and Transkei). While the laws of disintegration during the Apartheid era were formulated on the belief that the people of South Africa had different cultures and languages, the general principle of divide and rule was the main driving force. Jokweni (2002) portrays this dominant mode of thinking when stating that “it is . . . a fact that the real cause for disintegration was fear of unity or integration of any form among Africans, as it was always perceived as a threat to White supremacy” (p.178). This perspective points out that the indigenous languages were at the center of the struggle for domination and that they were targeted as tools for social disintegration and the maintenance of White supremacy. The politics of racial domination therefore permeated the sociolinguistic landscape of the country in this unprecedented manner as described through the homeland system. Afrikanerization of South Africa from 1948 to 1994 was the most overtly politicized period with a number of language related events. First, the Bantu Education Act 47 of 1953 increased the use of mother tongue from grade 4 to grade 8, for fragmentation of the African people whose majority status was both a political and social threat to the minority settlers. Even though the use of mother tongue was recommended as the best policy for development of indigenous literacies by UNESCO in the same year, a number of scholars (Heugh, 2002; Kamwangamalu, 1997; Reagan, 1986, 1988, 2002) observed that the Bantu Education Act was not based on UNESCO’s declaration for mother tongue education as a universal norm. On the contrary, the Act was meant to re-tribalize the Africans so that they had no access to the languages of power and to restrict them to menial estates and lowly occupations (Makalela, 2014; Prah, 1995, p.68). Following the extension of mother tongue education to grade 8, Afrikaans and English were used as languages of instruction from grade 9 to 12 on a 50:50 basis. This means that 50% of the school subjects were taught in Afrikaans, and another 50% taught in English. Subsequently, mother tongue instruction was reduced to grade 6 after mounting protests by the main liberation movements in the 1950s: African National Congress and Pan African Congress. These organizations negatively associated mother tongue education with Apartheid policies of divide and rule and inferior education for Africans. Because education in mother tongue was used to inculcate an inferior Bantu Education curriculum specially designed for subordination of the African child, it had already tainted the very notion of mother tongue education (Alexander, 2001, p.16).

2.9 The Soweto student uprising

23

2.9 The Soweto student uprising In 1976, the students filled the streets of South Western Townships (SOWETO) decrying the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in their education. The protests were prompted by the Apartheid regime’s attempts to impose Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in primary schools in order to reduce the domination of English, which was then used as the medium of learning and teaching from grade 5. This attempt was met with one of the bloodiest resistances to language practice in the history of South Africa where schoolchildren sacrificed their lives in pursuit of linguistic justice (Kloss, 1978). Opinions do vary as to the purpose of the struggle, but Omer-Cooper (1994, p.226) captures the mood of the event by categorically stating: “in 1976, school children throughout Soweto staged a massive demonstration against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction.” Language thus became a source of social strife in the socio-political affairs of the country. After the Soweto uprisings of 1976, there was a rapid emergence of private English medium schools (called Model C) and the reversal of the Afrikaner language policy to the original missionary policy of first 4 years of mother tongue education in public schools (Education Act of 1979). While Afrikaans was reversed as the medium of instruction in primary schools, the struggle did not help to elevate the status of indigenous African languages. By default, English gained more clout over Afrikaans as the language of learning and teaching in Black schools. The universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch followed the EnglishAfrikaans bilingual medium program with courses available in both languages (Du Plessis 2006). In the subsequent years there were changes from bilingual universities (mainly parallel medium) to monolingual universities due to Afrikaans-speaking students enrolling mainly at what eventually became Afrikaans universities. Non-Afrikaans-speaking students, on the other hand, moved to different universities where Afrikaans was not the medium of instruction. This student movement led to a decrease in non-Afrikaans mother tongue students and to the dropping of English programs in Orange Free State, Pretoria, Rand Afrikaanse, and Potchefstroom universities (see Hill 2009). Also worth noting was a parallel development in the English dominant medium universities that saw a decline in Afrikaans mother tongue speakers, which gradually led to the dropping of Afrikaans programs (Du Plessis, 2006). These scenarios depict a gravitation towards separation of languages and a contradiction to the national language plan to unite Afrikaans and English speaking citizens.

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Chapter 2 History of language war and its sociolinguistic output

2.10 Linguistic apartheid From 1948, Afrikaans became the official language of government, side by side with English. As stated above, all government schools had to become bilingual through the choice between Afrikaans and English or a combination of these two for instructional purposes. In addition, schools were compelled to teach Afrikaans and English as school subjects. In order to limit access to English, the Afrikaner government developed each of the 9 African languages for use as the media of instruction from grade 1 till grade 8 in the Bantustan homelands under the so-called separate development program. Afrikaans and English remained compulsory subjects for all schools (Heugh 2002). In response to the separate development program that increased tuition through African languages, the liberation movements protested against this policy until the old missionary language policy of first three years of education in home languages was in re-introduced. This means that Black children could learn through their home languages for three years instead of 8 years. Another parallel movement on the part of the government was to increase tuition through the medium of Afrikaans in Black schools. The tensions between the liberation movements and the state’s insistence on Afrikaans reached a turning point when school children protested against introduction of Afrikaans as the language of learning in primary schools in what is known as the Soweto Student Uprising in 1976 (Hartshorne 1987). Another development during Apartheid was the creation of Black universities from 1959 till 1994 mainly in the linguistically segregated reserves for Black people. There were eight reserves, referred to as Bantustan homelands, which were created on the basis of perceived language differences. According to Hill (2009: 337): The government promulgated the Extension of University Act (No.45 of 1959), which provided the framework for racial demarcation in higher education. This Act defined most established universities as “white” and prepared the ground for the creation of “nonwhite” institutions. The new institutions were further subdivided to serve specific ethnic groups, where ethnicity was operationalized in terms of race and language.

Outside of the ‘amaXhosa institution’ (Fort Hare), which had come into existence much earlier, there were three other universities that were established: University of Zululand, University of the North and the University of the Western Cape (Hill, 2009: 337). These universities, except the University of the Western Cape which used Afrikaans, became English monolingual (Hartshone, 1987).

2.11 Post-apartheid Artificial constructions: A carry- over effect

25

2.11 Post-apartheid Artificial constructions: A carry- over effect As stated earlier, the new socio-political dispensation that started in 1994 somehow brought to an end language war by according 11 languages official status. In order to build a united nation, linguistic and cultural rights of all the people were taken into account in the negotiation for a new socio-political epoch. The Constitution of the Republic accorded official status to previously marginalized languages. Parity of esteem and equal treatment of these languages however remain a challenge as English and Afrikaans continue to have monopoly in positions of high prestige, including education, law, economy and politics. According to the 2011 census, the languages of South Africa show the following figures: Table 1: Official languages of South Africa. Language

Number of speakers*

% of total

Afrikaans

  

.%

English

  

.%

isiNdebele

  

.%

isiXhosa

  

%

isiZulu

  

.%

Sepedi

  

.%

Sesotho

  

.%

Setswana

  

%

 

.%

SiSwati

  

.%

Tshivenda

  

.%

Xitsonga

  

%

Sign language

(Source: 2011 SA Census).

While all the major indigenous African languages are included as official languages, the naming of languages has not taken into account the historical divisions that exaggerated the differences. Makoni (2003), among other linguists, have argued that the Constitution has created artificial languages that has not taken into account degrees of mutual intelligibility between sister languages. Despite evidence showing that these languages can be harmonized in their

26

Chapter 2 History of language war and its sociolinguistic output

orthographies (Alexander, 1989; Makalela, 2005; Nhlapho, 1944), the Constitution adopted ‘artificial constructions’ that were not based on the pre-colonial sociolinguistic realities. Both the Constitutional listing and the census report do not take into account inter-comprehensibility (mutual intelligibility) within the Nguni group (isiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele and Siswati) and within the Sotho language group (Sesotho, Sepedi, and Setswana). As will be discussed in the next chapters, officialising separation of South African languages is a carryover effect of the colonial strategy of divide and conquer. That is, it is not a reflection of the sociolinguistic realities where the languages are used fluidly. In other words, the Constitution affirmed past control of African languages into isolated and multiple entities when in reality these languages can be fewer. Here it is instructive that language, like life cannot be controlled by the boundaries created in isolation from real use (Shohamy, 2006).

2.12 Conclusion In this chapter, I have described socio-historical contexts that shaped the sociolinguistic outputs of South Africa during the pre-colonial period and from 1652 till above roughly summarizes the South African language struggle prior to the multilingual policy of 1996 (which will be discussed in the next section) and can be summed up as: (a) exclusion and ethno-linguistic division of African languages, on the one hand and (b) promotion and exclusive use of Afrikaans, Dutch, and English on the other hand. Both factors (a and b) formed the core of the language question that has remained unresolved even in the new sociopolitical dispensation that started in 1994. The role of missionary linguists in the historical development of African languages orthographies is described in details in the following Chapter.

Chapter 3 Language inventions and the role of missionary linguists As followers of the Pietist tradition, Protestant missionaries believed that the gospel could only be communicated in one’s mother tongue, and subsequently learned African languages as a pragmatic necessity. (Norton, 2013:123–126) In 1908 some thirty two thousand Bibles, almost three quarters of which were in vernacular languages, were sold to Blacks by the Christian Literature Depot in President street, Johannesburg. Cities like Johannesburg became centres of literacy, where migrants from the rural areas were able to join church libraries and buy spelling books, primers and a variety of religious magazines and prayer books. While the books and teaching were often in the vernacular, the content reflected little else from the migrant miners’ own world. (Harries, 1994, p 216)

3.1 Introduction The South African language history between 1848 and 1948 is best captured by the phrase, ‘the book and the gun’ to reflect how writing system was developed under the aegis of imperial and paternalistic ambitions towards the local people. Observed from the extracts, there seems to be an acknowledgement that access to knowledge and belief in oneself as well as the higher sense of self are possible through the use of the languages one understands (Norton, 2013). At the same time, the use of one’s language when it is devoid of the speaker’s reallife experience is a form of disposition for the speaker of the local languages. Both extracts delve into the paradox of African languages: the need to use them and the need not to use them within their colonized status (e.g., arbitrary orthographies and versioned logic of English in their literacies) This is the language question that haunts language policy makers and planners who are in a polemic situation on the need to develop, use and promote African languages to assure equity and parity of esteem. This chapter explores this intricate relationship between colonization and Christianity and how these were interwoven in the development of differentiated writing systems for African languages.

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Chapter 3 Language inventions and the role of missionary linguists

3.2 Goals for African language inventions The history of African languages cannot be complete without a detailed analysis of the role of the missionary linguists and the colonial conquest under which they operated. The missionaries came from Britain, Germany, France, Sweden and North America and became the purveyors of literacy in South Africa by virtue of being the ‘first’ to develop orthographies of the indigenous African languages. Their task in developing these languages should, however, be understood within the broader mission to promote European ‘civilization’, modernization, progress and Christianity in the colony based on the ideals of nation statism. But far beyond this, we glean that the missionaries believed that “the gospel could only be communicated in one’s mother tongue, and subsequently learned African languages as a pragmatic necessity” (Norton, 2013: 125). It was also the role of the missionaries to create mission stations around the country and to manage the education of the natives who should be fit for slave routines. According to Prinsloo (1999), the first slave school was built in 1824 to include education of indentured slaves and the Khoi and the San people in the Cape. The school had no age restriction even though the majority were the adults- something that clearly contravened the cultural spaces where children and adults are separated in African traditions. The school curriculum was restricted to reading and memorization of the Bible, hymns and catechisms and application knowledge to their lives was irrelevant. In order to motivate the natives, a tot of brandy and two inches of chewing tobacco were given to the learners at the school (Prinsloo 1999). It is evident that the goal of developing African languages was literacy for Christianizing mission and that the purpose of missionary education is tightly connected to the European ideals of Enlightenment. African languages, in the same vein, were developed within the remit of European concepts of progress and development.

3.3 Misrepresentations and differentiation of orthographies and labels It may be argued that the missionaries did not understand the local culture and sociolinguistic complexities, which were outside of the European realm of language varieties, dialects and standards. While they put African languages for the first time into writing in the 1800, their arbitrary demarcation of language boundaries created a linguistic tribalization that coincided with the colonial conquest based on a divide and rule principle. Some scholars believe that the missionaries had the European notion of tribes, which were fighting, attacking each other without cultural and social spaces for cooperation. The European

3.4 Artificial multilingualism

29

tribes were known for ferocious attacks that plunged the continent into a ‘dark’ age and because of their understanding of tribes from this perspective, the missionaries assumed the same about the ‘dark’ African continent. Deliberate or erroneous, linguistic tribalization meant that variants of the same language were coded differently so that they had different orthographies and spelling systems. In the process of developing orthographic systems, the missionary linguists made mishearing errors that are still at the core of debates regarding the development of African languages writing system (Makalela, 2009; Makoni, 2003; Mansour, 1993; Prah, 1998). A linguist Nakin (2002) provides a panoramic overview as to how Sotho language varieties were differentiated in spelling and orthographies as follows: The emergence of Sesotho, Setswana and Sepedi as distinctive languages owes much to three different missionary societies whose activities were centered in different areas where Sesotho was spoken. The London Missionary society was active in the western side and the Sotho language became Setswana, the Catholic missionaries were active in the south and the Sotho language became Sesotho while the Lutheran missionaries were located in the north and the Sotho language became Sepedi. Therefore there were three varieties of the same language created: words pronounced the same way were now spelt differently. (Nakin 2002, p. 238)

This description explains how African multilingualism became exaggerated where, for example, one language was encoded into three different languages irrespective of their similarities. As stated above, differentiation of Sesotho, Setswana and Sepedi orthographies had to do with the deployment of different missionary denominations: Lutherans, catholic and London Missionary Society’s work in different directions of the same linguistic community. It is in this context that the European missionaries created a “multilingual complex” (Mansour, 1993) where varieties of the same language were elevated to status of languages and where these ‘languages’ were further drawn apart due to creation of boundaries between the colonies in Africa. In Nakin’s description, “words pronounced the same were now spelt differently” (P. 238). Even here it oes not follow that phonological variation necessarily needs different spelling systems for mutually intelligible languages.

3.4 Artificial multilingualism The Sotho example discussed above reflects an Africa wide problem where missionary linguists arbitrarily elevated the status of dialects to that of dlanguages often without consideration of the sociolinguistic landscape and communicative practices of the speakers (Alexander, 1989; Bokamba; 1995; Campbell-Makini,

30

Chapter 3 Language inventions and the role of missionary linguists

2000; Makoni, 2003; Mansour, 1993; Prah, 1995, 1998). Campbell-Makini (2000) observes that the whole Sub-Saharan Africa was plunged into instances of mishearing and faulty transcription where dialects of the same language and different languages were created from what was one language (p.115). Over and above founding colonies and later expanding Christian missions, it was part of the missionaries’ task to analyse the phonology and grammar of the African language in order to devise a writing system, and ultimately, to translate the Bible, the catechism, and hymns. (Mansour, 1993, p. 12)

According to Mansour (1993), practical and urgent goals of the missionaries’ linguistic analysis surpassed development of a scientific methodology for the study of indigenous African languages. There were two steps in the process of translating the Bible into indigenous languages. First, data were collected from one particular place and from one or two informants. Limited responses from these informants were generalized and used in encoding the written registers. In addition, the researcher received the native speakers’ preconceptions and prejudices concerning their language and its relationship with varieties from neighbouring villages through the informant (s). This introduced the problem of language labels, which still haunts African linguistics.

3.5 Competing denominations and dialects across the borders One of the consequences of competition over converts in different colonies that were divided following the European nation states in 1884 is that dialects of the same language were found in different borders. In other words, balkanization of Africa into bounded colonies has added another level of complexity on African multilingualism. The results of these arbitrary divisions and bounding colonies left a situation where one African language was spoken across several colonies. Equally, there were missionaries of different denominations who competed for converts to the extreme that it was not possible to use same orthographies in different colonies. Added to the need for colonial powers to influence their colonies and the fact that the missionaries came from different countries (i.e., representing different colonial powers), the idea of having a large national language with the same orthography was virtually impractical and dangerous for the colonial masters. Here, one adds to the fact that they were not fully conversant in the languages they were developing and that they may not have experienced the similarities. Because of this equation, the result has been that they did not make scientific comparison of data on the languages they were

3.5 Competing denominations and dialects across the borders

31

transcribing in order to establish the degree of similarities or differences between language varieties (Mansour, 1993). The Sesotho variety spoken in Lesotho and South Africa is a case in point to show cross-border treatment of similar language varieties. Groenewald’s (1995) study of the Sesotho orthography has affirmed the view that the missionary linguists misinvented the orthographies of African languages (see also Makoni, 2003) and elevated dialects of the same language to fully-fledged languages through the lack of a centralized system both within and between the European nation states assigned colonies. He elaborates on the work of missionary linguists that the different missionary societies worked independently of one another, and developed written forms in order to translate the Bible in the different languages as well as to provide liturgical documents in these languages. (Groenewald, 1995, p.381)

In extreme cases, one dialect (now conceived as a language) was encoded with two different orthographies. One of the known cases of orthographic differentiation in one dialect is the case of Sesotho, a language variety spoken in Lesotho and in South Africa. Prah (2001) observes that the orthography of Sesotho of Lesotho was designed by the Protestant Evangelical Mission and the one in South Africa was designed by the London Missionary Society (see also Nakin, 2002). As a result of the lack of coordination and centralized system of standardization, a spelling system of one dialect was differentiated with Sesotho of Lesotho following a conjunctive system (toward agglutinative) while the one in Free State, South Africa, followed a disjunctive orthographic system (toward isolating). These systems were studied in Groenewald’s (1995) project where he concluded as follows: . . . Southern Sotho today has two writing forms. This clearly shows that languages, which on the surface appear to be innocent vehicles of communication, in fact often are more than that for their users: they can be the stick with which the dog is beaten. (Groenewald, 1995, p. 381)

The clause in italics shows that linguistic barriers that are caused by misspellings and divergent orthographic representations can be detrimental in dialects whose speakers share a high degree of mutual intelligibility. These arbitrary orthographies have created a language problem in Africa where the speakers “are now faced with the phenomenon of having a number of languages entered into the catalogue of African languages where in fact there should be only one” (Mansour, 1993. p13). As has been shown previously (Makalela 2005, 2009), Sesotho language variety has high degrees of mutual inter-comprehensibility with sister languages in the same cluster, Sepedi and Setswana (see also Chapter 6 in this Volume). Differentiation of orthographies of what might be considered

32

Chapter 3 Language inventions and the role of missionary linguists

one dialect deepens the language question in South Africa and its neighbours and more pointedly reveals the legacy of the missionary linguists and colonial conquest. Perhaps Groenewald’s (1995) assertion is correct that language becomes the stick through which its speakers are separated and confused.

3.6 European ethno-linguistic boundaries Far from the outcry that African languages were written down by the missionary linguists who represented different missionary societies and that they did not speak African languages to know them enough to develop their orthographies, there is a gross reality that their work was underpinned by ideological stances of Europe’s one-ness ideology. Because it was not practical to have one nation, one state in Africa, the default was to create ‘many nations within a nation’. The linguist and social activist, Professor Kwesi Prah (1995) highlighted the fact that the current ethno-linguistic boundaries were caused by missionary involvement in the writing system of the indigenous African languages. He drew a conclusion that the Missionary linguists were fairly idiosyncratic in the way they developed orthographies and through such practices projected their own views in the creation of separate identities for people who were not really ethno-linguistically different. (Prah, 1995, P.81)

The observation that the missionaries projected their own views in dividing languages into dialects coincides with Makoni’s (2003) description of mis-invention of African languages. According to Makoni (2003), division of African languages in the current boundaries reflects a European centered mode of thinking, positivism, as reported in this passage: The missionaries created languages, which were describable as mutually exclusive boxes as opposed to the interconnectedness. In fact, the very notion of languages as discrete units, or “boxes” is a product of European positivism reinforced by literacy and standardization. (Makoni, 2003, p.141)

We gather from this quote that Eurocentric lenses of individuality and separateness contributed to the missionaries’ view of the African sociolinguistic landscape. In other words, the missionaries could not adequately comprehend the interconnectedness of speech that cuts across a wider spectrum of the communities they found. This idea of imposing monolingual ideologies in a heteroglossic African context restates the view presented above that the present nine indigenous languages are missionary created languages, which do not reflect a true sociolinguistic landscape of South Africa. In brief, the reasons for dialect differentiation include lack of detailed studies on African languages, the urgency to

3.7 Conclusion

33

translate the Bible into the local languages, rivalry among various denominations and nationalities, mishearing, and European positivism.

3.7 Conclusion This chapter explored the involvement of linguistic missionaries in the development of indigenous African languages’ orthographies. Imbued by the nation state ideas of the Enlightenment period in Europe, the missionaries had broader missions to civilize, modernize and Christianize the locals. Developing the writing system for African languages is thus understood within this mission. They however did not have a full understanding of the sociolinguistic context and had no central coordination system due to competition over new converts. The people of South Africa were viewed through monolingual lenses; that is, many languages of different tribes that were unrelated. This is the burden for African languages, which have to date not been redressed by post-colonial states. The missionary linguists’ work became a precursor for the formal separation of languages into ethno-linguistically based homelands at the end of the Second World War and at the beginning of Apartheid South Africa in the early 1950’s. We have noted also that outside of the Bible translation mission to Christianize the locals, language became a yardstick to divide and rule the masses as exemplified by the Bantustan homeland system that was based on perceived language differences.

Chapter 4 Myths and controversies on policy implementation It is an amazing fact that South Africa, in spite of its modernist pretensions, is one of the few countries worldwide where at least primary school children are not taught through the medium of the mother tongue or a language of immediate community . . . It is an equally amazing fact that within the South African context the only children who receive mother tongue medium education virtually from cradle to the tertiary level are the minority English and Afrikaans-speaking children of the country. Children born to parents whose home language is one or other African language; i.e., the vast majority of our children, are doomed to be taught through a medium of the second language (mostly English) from the third or fourth year of school, mostly by teachers for whom this medium is at best a second language but often only a third language. (Alexander, 2001, p.16–17)

4.1 Introduction One of the ironies of the eleven official languages of South Africa is that English and Afrikaans have continued to become the dominant languages of the Republic despite the Constitutional commitments to multilingualism in the post-Apartheid era. Since the inception of the missionary language in education policy where children are taught through the medium of their home languages for the first three years of education and then transition into the medium of English at grade 4, there have not been visible changes to effect a change in this policy. The only reported attempt was the use of isiXhosa as the medium of teaching mathematics and science from grade 4–6 that was piloted since 2012. This means that grade 12 examinations are only available in the medium of English and Afrikaans whereas African languages remained media of assessment of content knowledge only up to grade 3. It is in this context that the linguist Neville Alexander (Alexander, 2001) finds this situation amazing as it excludes the majority of the school going learners from attaining education in the languages they understand, which in turn contradicts the very foundation of an equitable and socially just society. Yet the majority of the children learn through languages that isolate them and force them to resort to memory instead of reason. I have referred to this process of resorting to memory elsewhere as cognitive inconvenience (Makalela 2013) or as Brock-Utne (2000) would refer to it, stupification of African children. This practice

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4.2 Rationale for 11 official languages

35

reproduces social inequalities of the past and has relegated children with African language backgrounds as second class citizens (Alexander, 2001) within the context of a multilingual and multicultural society that sought to redress past linguistic and cultural imbalances. This chapter explores the myths and debates around 11 official languages.

4.2 Rationale for 11 official languages It is needless to state that the 11 official language policy came as a result of a process of intense debates and controversies around the idea of nation building in the post-Apartheid South Africa. These debates and negotiations dovetailed the discussions around cultural and linguistic transformation between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Afrikaner lobby groups led by the National Party. The latter’s interest in the subject was sparked in part by the ANC’s initial policy preference for English as the only national official language that can be utilized, despite its colonial baggage, in order to heal the rifts of segregated society and harness national unity. The Language Task Group (LANTAG), which was formed as part of the preparation for post-Apartheid South Africa, considered various submissions from political parties and lobby groups. The Afrikaner groups lobbied for Afrikaans and Afrikaner culture to be protected under labels such as self-determination. Accepting the retention of Afrikaans meant that English and Afrikaans were going to be the default languages of postApartheid South Africa. In order to avoid repetition of past linguistic imbalances that favoured these Afrikaans and English, the Africanist lobby groups impressed that all the nine indigenous African languages should be accorded the same status. This is in brief how South Africa arrived at the 11 official language policy and then to specific constitutional mandate to protect and actively promote the use of indigenous African languages in public and positions of high prestige in the society. To attain this goal, a language parastatal, Pan South African Language Board (PANSALB), was decreed as a statutory body to oversee the development and use of all the official languages, with special attention to African languages (PANSALB, 2000). Worth noting from the above discussions is that the 11 official language policy emerged from compromises that were prefaced to fit in the ideological stances of an inclusive government of national unity. For purposes of this chapter, indigenous African languages came last in the negotiations on cultural inclusivity.

36

Chapter 4 Myths and controversies on policy implementation

4.3 The politics of parent choices The education clause in the Bill of Human rights declared that “every child has the right to receive education in the official language of their choice in public educational institutions where that education is reasonably practicable (RSA 1996:29 (2)”. The choice is relegated to School Governing Bodies and parents of the children in every public school. Being aware of the challenges of handling 11 official languages within the structural framework of Apartheid and colonial past, the new government established PANSALB to oversee the implementation of the 11 official languages. Notably, however, the Black elite and the middle class began to take their children to former English only schools in search of educational opportunities associated with the schools. It became inevitable that English receiving more clout in the post-independent era as the dominant language associated with upward social mobility. On the other hand, rural and peri-urban schools, which form approximately 80% of the school populations, have continued to use subtractive bilingual policy of first three years in home language and transfer to English from grade 4 till university. Here, parents respond to the practical needs of their children in the absence of equitable resources in the poor rural and peri-urban schools. Although every child has, constitutionally, a right to choose to learn in the languages of their choice, such an option is curtailed by practicality factors, which include availability of teachers and teaching materials in the languages of choice.

4.4 Myths about African languages It is important to unpack some of the myths that provide grand narratives around the challenges of developing and using African languages in education. As seen in many parts of Africa, research has documented the myths (e.g., Roy-Campbell, 2000), which I repeat here for the purpose of this chapter.

a. Learning through a language leads to its acquisition Outside of structural limitations to choose any language of learning and teaching outside of the formerly privileged languages, there is a belief that learning through the medium of English even in the remotest parts of the country would translate into acquisition of better English (Makalela, 2005). Because of this grandiose expectation, parents and teachers believe that English should be used as the language of learning and teaching due to its capital as the language

4.4 Myths about African languages

37

of upward social mobility. In reality, however, this belief does not find support in the literature on language of instruction worldwide. On the contrary, bilingual research is replete with the findings that development of second language is dependent on one’s first language. This means that languages are mutually interdependent as known from Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis and the Continua Biliteracy’s frames languages as entities of ecosystem of communication and meaning making (Hornberger, 2002). In brief, it is necessary to use home languages as media of learning and teaching as long as possible in education while learning English as a subject. It should be stated that learning languages is not the same thing as learning though a languages. Despite research findings than span over 100 years on the negative consequences of using English as the language of learning and teaching through early immersion programmes in Africa, subtractive bilingual programmes, which were instituted by the missionary groups in the 18th century have remained in use in many African countries (e.g., MacDonald, 1990a). Most African countries continued colonial language in education policies in the post-independent era. Former French colonies adopted straight for French medium in line with the French total assimilation ideology while the former English colonies adopted first 3 or 4 years of education in home language and sudden transfer to English medium from grade 4 till university education. South Africa, as a former British colony has adopted the latter route for rural and peri-urban schools and the former in urban areas. South Africa’s 1997 Education policy states: Subject to any law dealing with language in education and the constitutional rights of the learners, in determining the language policy of the school, the governing body must stipulate how the school will promote multilingualism through using more than one language of learning and teaching, and/or by offering additional languages as fullyfledged subjects and/or applying special immersion or maintenance programmes. (RSA 1997: 8)

Key to this policy is its generous opening on options to promote multilingual education. “Promoting multilingualism through using more than one language of learning and teaching” gives rooms for translanguaging in the classroom where more than one language of learning and teaching can be used. I worked with several schools in Limpopo province where the school governing bodies decided to adopt translanguaging as a tool for promoting multilingualism. Many schools have not changed their policy as they read multilingualism vertically. That is, the use of home language for learning and teaching in Grades 1–3 and use of English from Grade 4 is understood as satisfying the policy requirements of more than one language for learning and teaching. As a result, the consequences have been that the rural and peri-urban schools opt for home language and English as the

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Chapter 4 Myths and controversies on policy implementation

school subjects and English as the medium of learning and teaching in secondary schools despite this post-Apartheid language in education policy. The primary schools in the same context have home language for the first three years of learning, followed by English as the language of instruction. Further, both home language and English are taught as school subjects. The urban and elite public schools have mainly opted for English and Afrikaans as the fully-fledged school subjects with English used as the language of learning and teaching. The following sociolinguistic outputs have become evident: a. Rural and township schools continued use of home language and English; b. Urban and elite schools use English and Afrikaans; and c. Black middle class children use English and Afrikaans. Subtractive bilingual policy removes one’s language before one has developed full academic competence in the language. Mother speakers of Afrikaans and English have choices to use their languages from grade 1 to university, whereas speakers of African languages do not have similar privileges. Alexander (2002) reminds us of the social inequalities created by language in education practices of social exclusion. In brief, colonial language in education practices of one-language-one classroom have been continued instead of horizontal and dynamic forms of multilingualism that include translanguaging as contemplated in the policy document.

b. The costs of developing African languages One of the common myths around the use of African languages is that the enterprise of using African languages is costly for the state. As a result, many African governments resort to the status quo (“transferred language policies”) in order to save the costs of developing and investing in the local languages (Makoni, 2003; Makalela, 2005). I have stated elsewhere that this way of reasoning falls within the glottoeconomics model where language is seen within the economics framework of maximizing profit while minimizing loss. In reference to the reasoning above, the choice of English is associated with profit-making while use of African languages means that there will be loss of profit in the investment. However, this argument is lopsided and narrowly focused on the economic benefits of using English and protection of the economics interests of those who currently make profit from the English only language practices in multilingual communities. In a national television documentary on the issue of costs (17 August 2014), I have illustrated that this whole debate on costs is an economic battle- previously advantaged beneficiaries of the English commodity work against the idea of sharing the wealth that comes with rearrangement of languages as

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economic entities to benefit users and experts of languages that were previously marginalized. Researchers have, on the contrary, emphasizes the benefits of increasing national literacy rates, participation of the majority of the people in the national economy and skilled labour force, which can occur within the remit of languages that the people understand, as necessary conditions for economic viability and sustained. Linguistic disadvantage, as a corollary, limits confidence, high reasoning capabilities and creativity of the labour who resort to memorization and technocratic performance- a form of labour enslavement. Framed in this light, it is befitting to dismiss the argument about the costs as mythical narrative that seeks to retain social inequalities. Following on the glottoeconomics description, it should be emphasized that the economic debate is incomplete due to its over-emphasis of costs in a one-sided way. Cost-benefit analysis is used by economists to identify, quantify and evaluate monetary consequences of different business alternatives. Language planning decisions are however complex in that the non-material consequences, which are not calculable, may need to be considered. The exercise may still be useful, however, to provide a basis for a fair evaluation of both costs and benefits. As pointed out elsewhere (Makalela 2005: 159) the arguments about costs that are associated with African languages are “a partial application of cost-benefit methodology, without consideration of economic efficiency from the other side of the spectrum” with the recommendations, often unpronounced, for a zero alternative position and its resultant maintenance of the status quo. What is often neglected is the other side of the spectrum where the usability of African languages by larger markets (workers and consumers) becomes an economic incentive to opt for the languages of the masses. When framed in this light, eight the costs of developing materials in African languages should be weighed against the costs of high failure rate, dropout rates with only 40% of over a million Grade 1 learners making sitting for grade 12 final examinations. These children who resort to memorization over a period of 12 years barely make it through the final examinations. These challenges have to do, as well documented in research (e.g., MacDonald, 1990b; Pretorius and Mampuru, 2007; Makalela and Fakude, 2014) with failure to make a transition from learning through home language to English at grade 4 and the apparent lack of opportunity for high school learners to take examinations in their home languages, among other factors. Economically speaking, these costs of failure will, in the final analysis, outweigh the costs of developing and using African languages as some studies have revealed (e.g., Brock-Utne, 2001; Roy-Campbell, 2000). The benefits of using the languages understood by the majority of the learners in nation states are self-evident and need no emphasis here.

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Chapter 4 Myths and controversies on policy implementation

c. African languages are not developed Another controversy centres on the naturalized acceptance that African languages are not developed and as a result they are not fit for use for learning and teaching. This is a colonial metanarrative that was used since the Europeans came into contact with African languages. Invariably, the myth has made circles to the extent that most non-Africans living in Africa have shown no interest in learning and using African languages, with South Africa as a case in point (Makalela 2009). Alexander reminds us that the early European settlers chastised African languages and refused to learn them because they were sounding like “chuckling of turkeys” (Alexander, 1989:21). Accordingly, this view assumes that European languages are inherently superior with the exclusive tenacity to express all human thoughts, culture, religion, history, geography, science and technology. The idea of development of a language needs carefully scrutiny. Makalela (2005) has taken a different position in arguing that development is relative and that it used in paternalistic sense that other people have not yet ‘grown’ and their ways of growing should be like ‘us’. There are two ideas around linguistic developments. First, it should be stressed that all languages in principle develop out of contact with others. When languages first come into contact, new varieties emerge which roughly take these development steps: pidgin stage, creole stage, and ‘language’ stage. Pidgins are the most underdeveloped languages without regularized syntax and vocabulary. Once their syntax develops into regularized patterns (e.g., Subject Verb Object word order) and have a new generation of their speakers as home languages or mother tongues, they move to a stage of creoles or what linguists referred to as creolisation (Mesthrie, 2000). Creoles too undergo various stages named by linguists as basilect (beginning stage), mesolect (middle stage) and acrolect (advanced stage) forms and then they become recognized as languages (see Mufeni 2000 for a full appraisal and critique of the creoles and pidgins). These stages are not necessarily linear and they may be interrupted by a number of human factors such as standardization through writing. As a matter of fact, the human process of language planning and policy-making often intervene to influence behaviour towards these language forms. According to Mesthrie (2000:314), pidgins and creoles are no longer seen as linguistic curiosities and debased forms of European languages. Some of these are used in formal domains such as education. A typical example of an official pidgin is Tok pisin, which is one of the three official languages in New Papua Guinea (Mesthrie, 2000). Most of the creoles that have an official status are in the Caribbean Islands; for example, Haitian and Jamaican creoles are important ‘languages’ of communication in Haiti and

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Jamaica, respectively. This brings up an important consideration for linguistic development that there is an overlap between creoles and languages. The decisions about ‘development’ are based on human perceptions, not necessarily linguistic structures. In South Africa, for example, Afrikaans may be seen as a Dutch creole if Dutch is going to be used as a standard to judge the development of Afrikaans. To sum up, the view that African languages of the basis of development neglects the reality that African languages are not at the stages of either pidgins or creoles. On the contrary, they have developed alongside a historical continuum of language development. I have shown previously that a diachronic view of language development assumes that languages evolve from a highly synthetic stage- showing word relations in a sentence by means of inflections to a highly analytic stage where they rely heavily on word order. (Makalela, 2005: 158)

In related studies (Makalela 2004; 2013), comparison of African languages and English have shown that, for example, African languages have regularized their grammar while English is still torn between regular and irregular grammatical patterns. These studies showed that English relies on heavy verbal conjugations to distinguish habitual and progressive aspects (inner aspect) whereas African languages (e.g. Sepedi) do not have inflections to mark aspect, but rather rely on word order or syntactical organization to mark these aspect structures (outer aspect). These languages are thus older and have matured in their diachronic continuum of development; i.e., they are analytic. One of the concepts around development is usually couched around the ability of African languages to express sophisticated ideas or concepts in science and technology. This position has not considered that no language is inherently developed; they borrow words from other languages and invent words as changes evolve in societies. The medieval English characterized as Chaucerian and/or Shakespearan English relied on 10 000 words from French and inkhorn words from all languages it has come into contact with. Linguist processes of neologisms (developing new words based on concepts) and linguistic borrowing are normal processes that every language undergoes. However, if languages are not used in technology and science they will not have the vocabulary. The latter is the case for African languages in South Africa- not used as the media of learning and teaching beyond Grade 4. Their status of non-use is a reason for what critics claim as ‘not developed’. Bamgbose (2000) reminds us that for a language to develop, it has to be used. Otherwise, non-committal and vague language policies seen in postcolonial African countries make it practically impossible to use the languages and are responsible for their ‘stagnation’. Because language planning is future oriented, the myth on African languages as inherently inferior,

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underdeveloped or unable to express scientific concepts is far removed from the picture of language development.

d. Harmonization will kill African languages We have learned from the role of the missionary linguists that divisions of the orthographies of African languages have been exaggerated. There has been a debate to unify the orthographies of languages that are considered mutually intelligible from as early as Jacob Nhlapo’s report on the “trouble of a Babel of Bantu tongues” (Nhlapo 1944:10) in South Africa. Nhlapo’s (1944, 1945) proposal was prompted by what he saw as the growing linguistic tribalization among people who spoke dialects that were separated in writing by missionary linguists. As shown in different writings (e.g., Janks and Makalela, 2013), Nhlapo cited a word for ‘cow’, which has three distinct spellings in Sepedi, Setswana, and Sesotho as kgomo, khomo and kxomo, respectively. Despite these differentiated spellings, home languages speakers understand one another when they pronounce these words. For Nhlapo, these spellings are evidence of the fact that these three varieties are in fact one language that needed to be unified in writing because “writing is the best way to make languages grow together” (p.7). In this connection, unification of orthographies of closely related languages could save them from further fragmentation and death, and enrich them as useful vehicles of national cohesiveness. He then proposed that Bantu languages of South Africa be united in at least two categories: standard Nguni formed from a “mixture” of IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, IsiNdebele and siSwati and standard Sotho derived from Sotho dialects (Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana) as follows: Having agreed as to which are the chief Bantu languages in South Africa, we can also agree that the work of joining Bantu languages would chiefly have to do with these languages. From these tongues we can at first build up two languages. Zulu and Xhosa, together with the branches known as Ndebele, Swazi, Baca, etc., are so much alike that, put together, they can make one good strong language called Nguni. In the same way, Pedi, Tswana, and Southern Sotho, together with Kxatla, Tlokwa, etc., are so much alike that joined together, they can make one good strong language called Sotho. (Nhlapo, 1944, p.6)

Nhlapo’s proposal took into account the historical consciousness of the people of South Africa prior to the colonial period of 1848. According to oral narratives (conversations with Ntate Tladi, 12 July 2014) Sekhukhune Dynasty used to stretch from River Lekwe (Vaal River till Makhado (Louis Trichardt) with different dialects that were mutually intelligible. Outside of these historical ties

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between these languages, there are advantages harmonizing South African languages as elicited from Bantu Babel (Nhlapo, 1944): 1) Reducing the costs of translation 2) Enriching literary tradition and widening readership in African languages 3) Use of similar orthography for educational purposes 4) Creating a basis for the use of Bantu languages as the media of instruction in higher domains of science In addition, Nhlapo’s concern was the deteriorating standards of education, higher rates of illiteracy, dropouts and repeats in the Black community. He showed that only a third of African children were going to school while two out of three among those who were going to school would fail. For these reasons, Nhlapo (1944, 1945) saw the need for mother tongue education as a necessary step in alleviating the educational problems associated with the use of a foreign language. Language harmonization was regarded, therefore, as a transitional phase toward mother tongue education. Taken together, Nhlapo’s (1944, 1945) proposal called for a language planning-policy in South Africa with two main thrusts: (a) linguistic unification as a basis for national unity and (b) use of the unified vernaculars for the education of South African Black children. Nhlapo’s proposal was not developed for over four decades of Apartheid rule until it resurfaced through the National Language Project (NLP), a nongovernmental body formed in the mid 1980’s to work on language policy for new South Africa and Dr Neville Alexander’s controversial text: Language policy and nation building in South Africa/Azania (1989). After elaborating on the linguistic balkanization of Bantu languages under the Apartheid government, and contemplating the exigencies of planning for the new language policy of postApartheid South Africa, Alexander (1989) forcefully re-stated Nhlapo’s proposal as follows: . . . one issue has engaged my attention and will not be postponed. I refer to what I call the question of the possibility and desirability of consolidating (standardizing) Nguni and Sotho respectively. In a nutshell, I am examining and airing the possibility that major varieties of Nguni (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Ndebele) and Sotho (Southern Sotho, Northern Sotho and Tswana) can and should be standardized or unified in writing and in all formal settings (school, church, law, court, etc.). (Alexander, 1989, p.74)

Both Nhlapo (1944) and Alexander (1989) conceptualized harmonization only for writing. As in the quote above, the harmonized form is envisaged for use in formal settings like schools, courts, etc. Overall, this proposal underscores the view that communication within the Bantu language clusters is mutually intelligible and that degree of inter-comprehension should be a guiding principle in

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the formulation of a language policy for South Africa (see also Prah, 1993, 1995, 1998). After the Soweto Uprisings of 1976, which was a culmination of a protracted language struggle against the domination of Afrikaans and the entire Bantu education system, the language struggle in South Africa continued on two fronts: first to destabilize the hegemony of Afrikaans, and second to seek a lingua franca, English as a unifying language of struggle until the 1980’s. However, it is important to highlight the two ideological differences among Black freedom fighters: freedom for all (ANC) vs freedom primary for Blacks (PAC and AZAPO). When all the signs for freedom were visible, it became imperative for the political movements to prepare for Freedom. While the ANC took a decision to have English as the unifying language in their Harare Declaration, AZAPO and PAC did not agree with this sentiment – ideological differences the surfaced in the National Language Project (NLP). In his seminal work, language policy and nation building in South Africa/Azania (1989), Alexander argues that national unity is possible only through the languages of the masses, not English, which will elevate the position of very few elites. He states as follows: . . . one issue has engaged my attention and will not be postponed. I refer to what I call the question of the possibility and desirability of consolidation (standardizing) Nguni and Sotho languages, respectively. In a nutshell, I am examining and airing the possibility that major varieties of Nguni (xulu, Xhosa, SiSwati and Ndebele) and Sotho (Southern Sotho, Northern Sotho, Tswana) can and should be standardized or unified in writing and inall formal settings (school, church, law, court, etc) (Alexander, 1989, p.74)

This proposal is again a form of nationalism that Nhlapo had proposed before the beginning of Apartheid government policies. Alexander, here is also envisioning what the new South Africa can and should look like after the demise of Apartheid. He could predict that tribalization of languages for a period of over 40 years would have devastating consequences and result in disunity and fragmentation. Second, it was Alexander’s view that harmonized African languages will create opportunities for social equities where the majority of the South African population (Alexander, 2001, 1995, 1998), have access to education through African languages mother tongues in the same way that Afrikaans and English speaking children have advantages of learning to read and write in their home languages. It is important to highlight that the emergence of the harmonization idea at this period still became a lonely voice as it threatened the survival of Afrikaans as a dominant language, the hegemony of English as the sole medium of instruction in Black schools. But even a stiffer opposition was expected from Black intellectuals and people whose attitudes toward African languages were

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influenced by their (mis)use during Apartheid. Freedom thus meant dissociation from Afrikaans and use of African languages, which for so many people could resuscitate tribal enclaves. The fourth opposition was from among Black people whose Apartheid experience made them to view themselves as having grown far apart from one another with different identities. All these factors, taken together, suggested a very difficult road for the harmonization proposal. Like the Apartheid government, the new political dispensation gave no space whatsoever for possible unification of African languages as part of “redress” for linguistic inequalities of the past. Instead a Pan African language board was formed, again, mimicking the Apartheid language boards of the 1940’s. Disillusioned by the new language policy framework, Alexander laments at this linguistic paradox of post-independent era when his idea did not see the light. For the most part of the post-independent era, Alexander, continued to decry the weaknesses of the national language policy and embarked on projects imbued by his idea of language planning from below as an alternative path to upset the status quo. I have showed previously that harmonization in speech is already at work as typified by the preaching practices of the largest African church in South Africa, the Zion Christian Church, where alternation of languages go for one or mixed form of the Sotho languages and one or mixed forms of the Nguni languages. Another example of harmonized work is the national anthem, which has one Nguni version and one Sotho version. It is in this connection that there is a hope that “if a standardized written seSotho and a standardized written isiNguni, will . . . follow the path of the national anthem, then we are assured that the overtly exaggerated multilingualism in South Africa can be reversed for good”. (Makalela, 2005, p, 170).

4.5 Conclusion This chapter has highlighted some of the controversies and debates regarding the use of African languages in official domains and especially in education. The costs of developing African languages, the status as languages less developed to express scientific concepts and difficulties of harmonizing their orthographies for literacy development and for their use as languages of learning and teaching have been shown to be myths that are fuelled by the desire to maintain the unequal status quo, on the one hand, and mistaken beliefs fuelled by colonial ideologies of one-ness and rule and divide. It is in this connection that the linguist, Neville Alexander, decries the social inequalities created by the access

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to languages of learning and teaching by minority of the population whereas the majority of the population is still not privileged to use their own languages to access knowledge and education. The chapter showed that harmonization of the orthographies of African languages, given the history of arbitrary separations, will have unmatched advantages for the languages and the speakers.

Chapter 5 Mutual inter-comprehensibility: A case against the number of African languages Classification of African languages on the basis of mutual intelligibility has so far demonstrated that, as first and second language speakers, over 80% of Africans speak no more than 12 key languages (clusters which enjoy 85% of mutual intelligibility. (Prah, 2001, p.189)

5.1 Introduction The number of languages spoken all over the word ranges from 5000 to 10000 depending on one’s definition of ‘languages’ (see Gooskens, 2013). Linguists have established that mutual intelligibility is the primary criterion for separating language varieties from one another and a number of intelligibility tests have been developed (Kyjánek, & Haviger, 2019). Mutual intelligibility refers concept refers to the degree to which speakers of different languages can understand one another without additional effort. When language varieties of the same language meet the mutual intelligibility criterion, they are considered dialects of the same languages and where this criterion is not satisfied, the varieties are considered separate languages. There are no conclusive studies on the actual number of languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it is estimated that there are over 3000–6000 languages that are spoken natively (Webb and Kembo-Sure 2000). While the numbers show a wide-ranging guess depending on the researchers, but SubSaharan Africa, a regional space that makes 13% of the world population, makes up close to 70% of all the languages spoken in the world if we accept this enumeration. In this chapter, the validity of the claims about Africa and South Africa, in particular, having far too many languages is challenged.

5.2 Naturalised ‘speaking in tongues’ Most speakers of African languages have accepted the view that they speak different languages and, associatively, language policies have been developed to accommodate this perceived difference. Due to the large number of languages identified by external linguists and the missionaries in many countries in Africa, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614515067-005

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an ex-colonial language becomes the de facto official language of the different linguistic communities (Webb and Kembo-Sure, 2000). In this connection, English, French and Portugeese, among others, are typically used as the media of learning and teaching to avoid the perceived threat of choosing one local language over others. For this reason, it is often erroneously normalized to classify African languages according to the European linguistic identities such as Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone countries instead of Afrophone, which signals that the majority of the speakers use African languages more frequently that these exogenous languages that are mainly used by the elites in positions of high prestige (Brock-Utne, 2010, 2002, 2015). When mutual intelligibility tests were conducted by a large collaborative team of African researchers it was found that SubSaharan Africa has 12 major languages that are spoken as first or second languages (Brock-Utne and Prah, 2009; Prah). In this chapter, mutual inter-comprehensibility is preferred to mutual intelligibility to emphasize meaning making events by speakers and not the linguistic structures. That is, whether the speakers understand one another when engaged in conversations where more than one language is used. The next sections deal with the degrees of mutual intercomprehensibility among speakers of indigenous South African languages.

5.3 Mutual inter-comprehensibility and early standardization in Africa The fact that African languages were sporadically separated from one another without tests of mutual intelligibility has been an issue that was discussed by several scholars in Africa. These questioned the validity of current separation of linguistic entities in many parts of the continent (Makalela, 2009; Prah, 2009, 2002a and b, 2001, 1993). Realizing the risk of neo-colonial division the region into ethnolinguistic silos, African researchers sought to harmonize the written forms of the languages. There are a number of projects that attempted to harmonize indigenous African languages that were considered mutually intelligible in Africa. These include: (i) the stock of symbols prescribed for Senegal’s six recognized languages, (ii) UNESCO-sponsored Bamako meeting of 1966 on unifying the alphabets of Hausa, Falfude, Madingo and Kanuni, (iii) A Seminar on the Normalization and Harmonization of the Alphabets of the sub-region of Togo, Ghana, Upper Volta, Nigeria and Benin in 1975 and (iv) the Meeting of Experts on the Transcription and Harmonization of African languages in Niger in 1978 which has been cited elsewhere (Bamgbose, 1991). The successful harmonization models in Africa are Shona in Zimbabwe, Igbo in Nigeria and Runyakitara in Uganda. The Ugandan

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harmonization, in particular, has been successful due to the high level of sensitivity in choosing a name for the harmonized languages as well as the potential spin-offs in neighbouring states. The process of choosing a name is explained as follows: Runyakitara is a general name adopted by Makerere University in 1996 to refer to four western Ugandan dialects, namely; Runyuru, Rutooro, Runyankore, Rukiga . . . Other languages outside Uganda, such as Ruhunya in Tanzania and Ruhema in Zaire can also be considered to be dialects of [the evolving] Runyakitara language. (Owino, 2002, p.24)

Here we observe that four dialects in Uganda were initially divided as separate languages until the University of Makerere developed a model for harmonization, which included an adoption of a neutral name for the harmonized languages. The Ugandan, Nigerian and Zimbabwean cases attest to the view that many African language varieties were incorrectly accorded different status as different languages when in reality they had high degrees of mutual intelligibility to the extent that they could be unified.

5.4 Mutual inter-comprehensibility studies Apart from the three successful models of harmonization explained above, there is an Africa-wide project undertaken by the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS) in Cape Town, South Africa. CASAS started in the early 1990s with the mission that “Education in Africa at all levels should be transacted in African languages, the languages of the majorities of the people, and the languages in which these majorities create and think . . . ” (Prah, 2002a, p.1). CASAS saw the need to embark on harmonization projects as a means toward achieving mother tongue education for the masses of the continent. According to Prah (2002b), the task of harmonizing African languages is part of the process of rehabilitating these languages so that they are used as the media of instruction (p.1–6). Since this period, there’s been a proliferation of studies that focused on degrees of mutual intelligibility among Africa’s estimated 3000 languages. An important finding was revealed that among the African languages, there is mutual intelligibility to a degree of 85% and above and that these languages can be divided into 12 language clusters. Prah (2001) explains this finding as follows:

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Chapter 5 Mutual inter-comprehensibility: A case against the number

Classification of African languages on the basis of mutual intelligibility has so far demonstrated that, as first and second language speakers, over 80% of Africans speak no more than 12 key languages (clusters which enjoy 85% of mutual intelligibility). (Prah, 2001, p.189)

The 12 key languages are: Falfude, Hausa, Swahili, Nguni, Sotho-Tswana, Western Interlacustrine Bantu, Amharic, Yoruba, Igbo, Bambara, Oromo, and Luo (Prah, 2001). In an earlier study reported by Prah (1998), the degrees of mutual intelligibility were elaborated. The study showed that Falfude is spoken in 13 countries, with about 50 million speakers; Sotho is spoken in 6 countries in Southern Africa while Nguni is spoken in over 7 countries with about 40 million speakers. The CASAS research findings have renewed an interest in the intelligibility question in African linguistics.

5.5 Sotho languages Under the aegis of CASAS, there has been a number of studies that focused specifically on harmonizing Sepedi, Setswana, and Sesotho, using morpho-syntactic and phonological similarities as measures of mutual intelligibility (see Nakin, 2002; Matubatuba, 2002; Mwikisa, 2002). In all these studies, there is a general finding that the Sotho languages, even though written differently, derive from a common ‘mother language’ and that they still share a high degree of mutual intelligibility. An earlier connection between the three varieties was established in what is known as the Doke classification of the Bantu languages in the South Eastern Zone as represented in the following classification: Doke’s classification: 1. Nguni group- Xhosa, Zulu and Swati 2. Sotho group- Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana 3. Venda 4. Tsonga group- Tonga, Ronga, Twa 5. Inhabane group- Chopi or Lenge, Tonga (Nakin, 2002, p. 238) The study on mutual intelligibility among the Sotho languages provided compelling reasons why the Sotho dialects need to be unified. Based on his detailed comparison of the linguistic features of these varieties, Nakin conceived of a possible harmonization as a standardization that adopts a dialect democracy approach in which all dialects are elevated to the standard level, as opposed to the imposition of one dialect as standard over others. Following this view, these Sotho dialects can be united, refined and neutralized until they merge into a

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common standard language (p.241). Three factors that need to be taken into account were identified as: 1. Establishment of a basic vocabulary 2. Establishment of word pairs 3. Exclusion of borrowing and language universals With regard to the establishment of vocabulary, Nakin (2002) refers specifically to parts and functions of the body, domestic vocabulary, weather and natural phenomena, which are common in the three languages. Some of these vocabulary types are demonstrated as being common in Sepedi, Setswana, and Sesotho as in: Table 2: Sotho languages word equivalents. English

Sesotho

Setswana

Sepedi

Ear

Tsebe

Tsebe

Tsebe

Fat

Mafura

Mahura

Mafura/mahura

Water

Metsi

Metsi

Metsi

Establishment of word pairs in these languages involve words that have similar phonological shape and represent the same field of meaning. To exemplify, Nakin (2002) identified words for ‘try’ and ‘buy’, which are identically represented as leka and reka, respectively, in all three dialects. With regard to exclusion of borrowing and language universals, Nakin (2002), pointed out that words that have the same form but do not conform to established sound shifts will be regarded as not having their source from the original language. As a result, they need to be excluded from a pool of words that can be standardized in the new written system. This exclusion is a very important aspect of harmonization because already existing words will be used instead of coining new terms altogether (Nakin, 2002). The study went further to show that similar lexical, syntactic and morphological structures in three Sotho dialects are compelling reasons for harmonization (Nakin, 2002, p.246). For example, all three language varieties share the same noun class prefixes used in agreement markers, the pronominal system, number, and other morpho-syntactic features. Similar to other advantages of harmonization as outlined elsewhere, Nakin drew on points highlighted in Machobane and Mokitimi (1998) who viewed Sesotho harmonization in the following light:

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1)

The proposed orthography simplifies the reading and the writing of Sesotho for students. 2) It renders writing of Sesotho uniform wherever it is spoken. 3) It makes it possible for all Sesotho books to be read by every Mosotho. 4) It will reduce the publication costs. 5) The market for Sesotho books will increase. These benefits of harmonization listed above are contingent upon the commonly held view that the speakers of these languages are mutually inter-comprehensible. Matubatuba (2002) carried out another comparative study of Sepedi-SetswanaSesotho dialects, following a phonological process of palatalization. The results of this comparison show that palatalisation occurs in at least five identical categories as listed: a. with diminutives of nouns b. with passives of verbs c. with causatives of verbs d. with locatives of nouns ending with –ng e. with certain nouns of the bo- class f. with certain nouns of the le- noun class Given these phonological resemblances shown above, Matubatuba (2002) argued that a high degree of mutual intelligibility of the three languages could be established. As a result, he draws the following conclusions: Because of the level of mutual intelligibility of these languages, I strongly believe that we might not even need dictionaries as a matter of urgency while doing projects such as skills development to the illiterate masses and medium of instruction through the special lingual franca. (p.253)

Here we deduce that mutual intelligibility between the three languages is high to the extent that it would not make a difference whether speakers are exposed to any one of the variety at a time. The three languages in combination form a special lingua franca or a repertoire that is accessible across the board. A further analysis of mutual intelligibility in the spoken and written forms of Sesotho, Setswana and Lozi (a Sotho variety spoken in Zambia) was carried out. Using the Lord’s Prayer version written in Sesotho (1855), Setswana (1840) and Lozi (1951), Mwisa (2002) aimed at discovering the extent of vocabulary correspondence among the three versions of the Lord’s Prayer, and the extent to which the variation in orthographic representations in the three languages can be described in a way that makes it easy to predict and transcode from one language to another. The study revealed that Sesotho has 81 words, Lozi has 81,

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and Setswana has 70 words. Out of these words, it was found that correspondence between Sesotho and Lozi made up 87%. Correspondence between Setswana and Lozi is 68% while 66% was recorded for correspondence between Setswana and Sesotho. The study shows that even though the missionary linguists differentiated these dialects as different languages, the languages still have more cognate resemblances. When taken together, from these intelligibility studies, it is evident that Sotho language varieties have mutual intelligibility on the basis of their shared morphosyntactic, lexico-semantic and phonological features. The question remains, however, whether the speakers themselves will find these languages mutually intelligible as these linguistic analyses indicate. The studies have shown that language harmonization is premised on the objectives of language planning that provide a framework for re-standardization. From CASAS, linguistic analyses that test degrees of mutual intelligibility have been advanced, demonstrating that the language varieties under study are mutually intelligible in ways that warrant their harmonization.

5.6 Experiential mutual inter-comprehensibility Assessments of the degree of mutual inter-comprehensibility are incomplete without involvement of the speakers in natural conversations. In order to measure mutual comprehensibility, mother-tongue speakers of Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana language varieties were exposed to an experiment (see Makalela 2005, 2009) that provided them with space to have conversations on unrehearsed topics. The experiment included a series of tasks that included problem solving and argument development where speakers used any of the three languages. The sections that follow detail the experiments, results and arguments that show the degree to which African languages are mutually intelligible as well as the degree to which the speakers understand one another.

5.6.1 The experiment In two related studies (Makalela 2005, 2009), twelve (three from each of the languages) first year students at a historically Black university in South Africa were involved in an experimental project that sought to establish mutual inter-comprehensibility as different levels: (a) attitudes towards the idea of inter-comprehensibility, (b) perceptions on harmonization of the Sotho languages, (c) reading proficiency measures, and (d) inter-variety dialogues.

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a. Attitudes towards inter-comprehensibility Linguistic separation that came about as a result of colonial partitioning of African states and further separation of African languages into different homelands during South Africa’s apartheid have put the speakers far apart (Alexander 1989, 2001). It is expected that after so many years of boundaries, the users of the languages would believe that they do not speak languages that are mutually intelligible. The student-participants who were mother tongue speakers of these languages were assessed before and after treatment (engagement in inter-variety dialogues) on their beliefs about mutual inter-comprehensibility between the sister Sotho language varieties. The questions included the ability to speak and to read texts written in sister dialects, inter-dialect communication, judgments on most of the vocabulary in the sister dialects, and general opinion on Sotho mutual intelligibility among Sotho language varieties. At the end of the postexperiment tasks, the participants were assessed on their beliefs on mutual intercomprehensibility (i.e., if they believed they understood and were understood by speakers of their sister languages varieties) whether the differences observed in the means of the pre and post-tasks were statistically significant. The results of the test showed that the differences in the pre and post experiment task responses were statistically significant (tobs= 3.58, df=11, p.

Note: Factor=mean differences across three language groups.

The results of the One-way ANOVA test show that the differences between the three groups were not statistically significant (P>0.05). This means that the null hypothesis, which predicted for no statistically significant differences between across Sotho language varieties, is supported. The results allow the interpretation that the reading comprehension ability of texts written in Sepedi, Setswana, and Sesotho among the groups is about the same, irrespective of the speakers’ individual language varieties. In this connection, a claim for mutual comprehension can be made. The second one-way ANOVA sought to assess differences in the degree of performance per each of the four texts: Sepedi, Setswana, Sesotho, and Harmonized Sotho and whether such differences were statistically significant. The results of the one-way ANOVA analysis are summarized in the following table: The results of ANOVA test showed that there were no significant differences between the texts means (P>0.05). Consequently, the null hypothesis, which predicted that there would be no major differences between the texts, is retained, while the alternative hypothesis is rejected. The results imply that the performance on each of the texts did not yield differences and that the participants performed equally on all four texts. This finding supports the one above that showed that different performance ratings per language variety are not significantly different.

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Table 7: Reading Performance per Text. Source of Variation

Df

Sum of squares

Mean squares

F.Ratio

F.Probability

Factor



.

.

.

.

Error





.

TOTAL



.

Remark Retained P>.

Note: Factor = Language of the texts collapsed across speakers

Collectively, the results of the one-way ANOVAs show that there are no statistically significant differences on how each language group performed (p> 0.05) and that there are no statistically significant differences on the performance scores across the texts (p>0.05). This means that the groups performed equally on their comprehension test and that different texts did not produce statistically different results. The most interesting finding worth noting is that the participants not only performed similarly irrespective of dialect group, they also performed equally on the harmonized text. As a result, the conclusion drawn from here is that harmonization of Sotho dialects may not disadvantage one group over another because there is already a high degree of mutual comprehension. Unification of the written forms, therefore, would not require major changes in the already existing orthographies.

5.8 Conclusion To sum up the chapter, the results of the pre-task attitudes, matched t-test, and reading judgment test corroborate each other to show that harmonization of Sotho language varieties is feasible at least in two respects: (a) positive speaker attitudes and (b) mutual comprehension in written registers. Based on the improved attitudes observed in the post-task, it appears that harmonization of Sotho varieties may be a favourable path. This argument can be extended to the case of Nguni languages as the CASAS research has pointed out. Such a path may require minimal adjustments to the current orthographies, which are mutually comprehensible across the language varieties. To this end, the popular view that South Africa has 11 highly differentiated languages has no intelligibility and comprehensibility basis. Makoni’s (2003) view that they have been misinvented and Makalela’s (2005) claim that 11 official languages policy reflects an artificial construction.

Chapter 6 Conversation analyses and high order thinking: A case for harmonization Languages are not merely systems of rules, as linguists emphasize, they are also vehicles of social interaction and badges of social identity. They are shaped by sociocultural forces, and our perception of them is conditioned by social practice, social relationships, and attendant ideology. (Winford, 2005: 35)

6.1 Introduction Engagement in interaction activities between speakers of related languages is a precursor to a determination of whether languages are not only mutually intelligible, but also that the speakers do understand one another. The degree of comprehensibility is also assessed on the level of complexity; that is, if speakers are able to express complex ideas when they use the languages interchangeably. Very few linguistic experiments are available to show conversational abilities of speakers of languages considered mutually intelligible. This level of analysis has not been reported in African languages- an indication that the research world has not considered the possibility of African languages being spoken across a wider spectrum of the linguistic code divides. It would seem plausible to engage African languages at the level of social practice and social relationships with the view to understand how linguistic overlaps are tied to social identities shared by users of mutually intelligible languages. This chapter undertakes this exercise to make a case for Sotho language cluster in South Africa. Translanguaging between speakers of African languages is therefore a useful barometer to determine when meaning cuts across boundaries of the named languages.

6.2 Meaning making between socially differentiated languages It is often conceived that speakers do not mean what they say and do not say what they mean within the fields of discourse analysis and pragmatics (Krifka, 2014). What the speakers say is expected to have appropriate interpretation by the hearers who make sense of the different layers of meaning such as the literal and intended meanings. In the field of pragmatics meaning is simultaneously https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614515067-006

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interpreted at three levels: first, every utterance has a literal meaning (locutionary meaning), intended meaning (illocutionary meaning) and the actual performance of what the speech intended (perlocutionary force). Consider the following utterance between a teacher and learners in a Grade 8 class: Teacher: It is hot in here. Learner: (goes to close the door).

The teacher’s mere utterance that “it is cold” seems at the face value to be a description of the weather condition of the classroom (locutionary meaning). However, the implication is correctly inferred by the learner who understood the utterance to imply that “he should go open the window” (illocutionary meaning). This indirect command eventually sees the learner performing an act of closing the window (Perlocutionary force). While some utterances can be far more sophisticated and complex, cooperation between interlocutors as in the example above suggests that there is a high degree of comprehensibility between them. The idea of cooperation between speakers has been a central idea in conversational analyses from as early as the Gricean school of thought. Research has however in the recent years showed that the notion of cooperation is relative and it is context and culture-bound. Grice (1975) distinguishes specific maxims under the umbrella of cooperative principles: 1. Quantity. Speaker’s contribution is as informative as required. 2. Quality. Speaker tells the truth or provides adequate evidence for his/her statement. 3. Relation. Speaker’s response is relevant to the topic of conversation. 4. Manner. Speaker speaks straightforwardly and clearly and avoids ambiguity and obscurity Linguists asserted that while not all the maxims may be obeyed at a given speech event, some of them have to be obeyed for the conversation to succeed (e.g., Avunon, 2018). However, the assumption under the maxim of manner is based on the Western maxim of straight to the point as seen in and this contravenes the circumlocution logic of African languages where high levels of indirection and ambiguity are valued. These languages are considered hearer-responsible as the hearers are engaged in a manner that challenges them to draw textual coherence from outside of the text (Motlhlaka and Makalela, 2016; Makalela 2019). For the purpose of this chapter, the maxim of manner will be interpreted from the rhetorical logic of African languages of Bantu origin: speakers use a dialogic move that allows the hearer to draw inferences external to the text. I will refer to this as the maxim of circumlocution. Altogether, these maxims have been appropriated

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here to provide a measure of how the three languages under study are mutually intelligible and the degree to which the speakers of these languages understood one another. Interactions between interlocutors require a deep sense of understanding of the meaning intended by the speakers in order to make correct judgments about what is implied by a given utterance.

6.3 Focus group conversations I have previously carried out a series of focus group discussions to measure conversational comprehensibility speakers of mutually intelligible languages was conducted. The experiment consisted of 12 respondents, with four representatives from each of the three language varieties. The respondents were engaged in a focus group discussion on the topic: stereotypes, which lasted for a total period of 180 minutes, which were spread over a period of 5 days. In the order given to the respondents, the Sepedi group talked about the causes of social stereotypes in their communities; the Setswana group focused their presentation on the dangers of ethnic stereotypes; and the Sesotho group focused on the possible solutions. After each short presentation, the dialogue included questions, requests for clarification and rebuttal when it was necessary. The video episodes that were captured in the conversations were transcribed and categorized into bilingual interaction (when two speakers of different languages interact) and multilingual interaction (when speakers of three languages interact) segments, and then subjected to discourse analysis. The aim of the analysis was to determine whether the speakers of these languages communicate without barriers in their interactions. Prominence was particularly given to the maxim of relation in the analysis on the assumption that interlocutors can only be relevant to and stay on the discussion topic if they understand each other. In addition the utterances were subjected to three levels of meaning: locutionary (literal meaning), illocutionary (implied meaning) and perlocutionary force (the action or response based on the illocutionary meaning). In other words, the analysis not only focused on whether there is mutual inter comprehensibility, it also focused on the depth of intelligibility usually attained by interlocutors who speak the same language.

6.3.1 Bi-variety discourse patterns The following subsections present prototypical cases of mutual intelligibility and misunderstandings through an analysis of bi-dialect interactions between speakers of (a) Sepedi and Sesotho, (b) Setswana and Sepedi, and (c) Sesotho

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and Setswana. This analysis is followed by a presentation of two cases of tridialect interactions, involving a series of utterances across the three Sotho varieties. Mopedi and Mosotho The discussion on ethnic stereotypes provided ample opportunities for bi-dialect interactions between Sepedi speakers and Sesotho speakers. For the purpose of this analysis, the Sepedi-speaking respondent is referred to as Mopedi, meaning speaker of Sepedi or Sepedi speaker. The Sesotho-speaking respondent, on the other hand, is referred to as Mosotho, which means a speaker of Sesotho. A prototypical case of bi-variety interactions is illustrated in the following episode: #A. (Mopedi): Gape nka re lena batho ba Lesotho le swanetše le nyake tsebo pele ke ra ditaba ka moka gore le se ka no re felo mo go na le boloi . . . le swanetše gore le nyakišiše gore ka nnete felo mo bo tletse boloi ke ra gore go nale batho bao ba diago ka nnete naa ka gore ke kwešiša gore a se kamoka akere le gona ke gohle mo go na lego boloi as bo mo fela. [You people of Lesotho (not necessarily referring to Lesotho as a country, but an area occupied by Sesotho speakers), need to find information first, I mean all sides of the story so that you do not generalize that there’s witchcraft here . . . .you should find out whether it is true that there is witchcraft, I mean, there are people who are really doing this because I understand that it is not everywhere (in the Province) where there is witchcraft]. #B. (Mosotho): Ena ho tsho bjalo le ha re batlisisa re ba tla ho tseba hore nnete ke hore ba loya batho ba Limpopo ha ba re fe tlhaloso ye eleng yona hobane honabjalo. Motlhala, ngwanesomane o itse ho nna ha ke mmotsa hore naa boloi bo tletse Limpopo . . . O re ha dio dintho tseo bjalo mo re tswang teng naa . . . ka fao ha a ntlhalosetsa, ene nna ke tlo qeta ka hore boloi bo teng ka hobane . . ...a ntlhalosetsa hore boloi bo hona kappa che o tla re honna: “Tloha wena mosotho wa ho ja pere o aparang kobo le motshehare. Bjalo a ke na tsebo, ke tla nka qeto ya hore boloi ke nnete ho a loyiwa Limpopo. [It is like that even when we investigate, we need to know whether it is really true that the Limpopo people are bewitching . . . let them give us the real explanation because, now, for example, this brother/sister of mine said to me when I asked whether there’s witchcraft in Limpopo . . . . He asks me if we don’t have these things from where we come from . . . therefore refusal to explain this to me brings me to a conclusion that there is witchcraft because . . . he did not explain to me whether or not there is witchcraft . . . he’ll say to me “Get lost you Mosotho who eats a horse and dress on blankets during the day.” Now, I do not have knowledge (I sought for), I will conclude that it is true there is witchcraft in Limpopo].

The utterance in #A responds to an earlier charge in the conversations that one of the chief stereotypes the Sesotho speakers have about Sepedi speakers is that there are pervasive witchcraft practices in the Limpopo province. As residents of the Limpopo province, Sepedi speaking respondents felt personally attacked and then took a defensive position throughout the discussion as articulated in

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utterance # A. In this utterance, Mopedi challenges the witchcraft charges labelled against her province. She then argues that witchcraft practices are an illusion. While there is an implied admission that witchcraft practices may be found in other parts of the province, the respondent charges the Sesotho interlocutors to investigate before they draw generalizations about witchcraft among the Sepedi-speaking population. The response from Mosotho in utterance #B denotes a high degree of understanding to the challenge made by #A. The speaker in #B claims that investigations into witchcraft practices do not matter because students from the Limpopo province tend to be defensive when confronted with questions that seek more information on the practice. To illustrate the futility of investigations, Mosotho provides an example about a brother (used generically to refer to any male especially within the same age group) who was asked about the witchcraft practice prior to the conversation. Instead of giving an honest answer, this brother asked the Mosotho speaker in #B if there were no similar witchcraft practices in speaker #B’s hometown. According to speaker #B, when such dismissive responses are given in the process of investigations, the logical conclusion would be that there is witchcraft in speaker #A’s province as generalized. Moreover, the speaker in utterance #B was told to get lost with another stereotype that people from her own speech community (Sesotho speakers) eat horsemeat and put on blankets around their bodies during the day light. Following the story presented by Mosotho in #B above, the brother who was asked prior to this conversation ridiculed her (Mosotho in #B) tradition of putting on blankets when they are not asleep, which was yet another stereotype. Topically, Mosotho understands the utterance by Mopedi irrespective of the different varieties of Sotho used in the dialogue. Following Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP), the conversation between A and B adheres to the maxim of relation. Speaker in utterance #B made a relevant reply to the speaker in #A on the same topic of witchcraft and stereotyping. Although speaker #B diverged slightly from witchcraft as an example of stereotype, she displayed how she fully understood the topic transmitted to her in a different language variety when citing a relevant example of stereotypes that the Sepedi speakers have about her own speech community; i.e., eating a horse and dressing on blankets in a hot day light. Furthermore, the maxim of quantity in the response from #B is not flouted. The utterance in #B gave sufficient information as required by the context with the aim of rebutting the challenge on the need to do investigation on witchcraft practices in Limpopo. She supported her rebuttal with a relevant counter-charge that investigating among Sepedi speakers on the witchcraft question was not helpful. Such investigations only deepen stereotypes from one language variety to another since the speaker in

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#B was put off the conversation with a stereotypical labelling as a horse-eater and day blanket-dresser in the process of the investigations. The information was neither limited nor excessive as far as the topic of stereotyped was concerned. It could be stated that the maxim of quality is also adhered to in terms of the established truths. Adherence to both maxims of relation and quantity, provide confidence that the language used in utterance #A did not impede understanding by the speaker in utterance #B. The degree of understanding is captured in the implicature observed in recorded extract below: #A (Mopedi): . . . lena batho ba Lesotho le swanetše le nyake tsebo . . . [You, the people of Lesotho should seek to find the truth] B (Mosotho): . . . le ha re batlisisa re batla ho tseba hore nnete ba loya batho ba Limpopo . . . [Even if we need to investigate the truth, we still need to know (from you) if the Limpopo people practice witchcraft]

The literal meaning (locutionary) of the utterance in #A is that the respondent in #B should seek out the truth. Speaker #B draws deep into the illocutionary meaning implying that he should not ask the speaker in #A in this particular conversation; instead, #B should find some time and go out into the community where #A comes from (Sepedi community in Limpopo province). Speaker #B who understands the illocutionary meaning of #A’s utterance chooses to insist on getting answers from speaker #A before any involvement with the community because the speaker in #A is one of the community members herself. This dialogue demonstrates that Sesotho speakers not only understand words in their literal (locutionary) meanings, they are also able to get the implied meaning (illocutionary), make relevant interpretations, and act on the interpretations (perlocutionary force). Because accurate interpretation of intended meaning requires a full understanding of the language through which the message is sent, the episode allows a linguistic interpretation to be made that the focus group discussion showed that Sesotho speakers can understand Sepedi speakers in conversations without linguistic impediments. One of the research questions as to whether intervariety communication can go on without major linguistic barriers is partly answered with this exposition. In particular, it answers the sub-question that sought to find out if Sesotho speakers could understand Sepedi speech tokens in real life conversations. Whereas the utterances in #A and # B show that Sesotho speakers understand Sepedi in the interactions, they do not necessarily show that the converse

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is true: Sepedi speakers understand utterances expressed in Sesotho. The following episode shows response of the Sepedi speaker toward a Sesotho speech token: #C (Mopedi): O dirileng ge o tseba ka taba ye ya boloi? [What did you do about the witchcraft information?] #D (Mosotho): Ke a botsa. Tjhe ha ke re ke a ga gabotse nna ke tsebile ha ke tloha hae hore mo Limpopo boloi bo teng ke bo bontshi. [I asked. No, well, I knew about the pervasiveness of witchcraft in Limpopo since I was home] #C (Mopedi): Ke bona bothata bona boo ka gore o tlogile ka gae ba go botša gore boloi. Limpopo ke bjo bontšhi. Jwale wena wa tseba ge o tloga gae gore Limpopo ke boloing ke bothata ba gona. Letšwa magaeng a bo lenba le tseba gore mo Limpopo dilo tše dimpe ke tše dintšhi goba boloi ke bo bontšhi. [I see that that is exactly the problem because you left home with knowledge that Limpopo has many witchcraft practices. Now that you left with this knowledge back home, this is the core of the problem. You left your homes with the knowledge that Limpopo has evil practices or that witchcraft is the order of the day]

This interaction begins with Sepedi speaker as in utterance #C asking what Sesotho speakers did when they heard about the information about witchcraft in the Limpopo province. This refers to the period of two weeks that the Sesotho respondents had spent in Limpopo. Sesotho speaker in #D responds directly to the question by saying that she asked for more information to verify the hearsay. However, this speaker expands her answer when claiming that she knew about witchcraft while she was still in her hometown. The new information on the topic has implications that one did not need to go to the Limpopo province to know that there is witchcraft there because it is a well-known fact. The response from the Sepedi speaker shows that the speaker in #C understands the shift of information from the given answer “I asked” to the new information. Speaker in #C challenges this new information about prior knowledge about witchcraft practice because it perpetuates the stereotypes. In other words, the speaker in #C has followed the shift in topic without difficulties. It is for this reason that the speaker in #C insists on the view that home developed stereotypes about witchcraft do cause stereotypes among Sesotho speakers and make them believe without further investigations even when they had arrived in the province. The Sepedi speaker’s ability to shift the response to follow the new information provided in the discourse suggests that this speaker has a high command of the utterance in #D. This respondent has successfully explicated

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the illocutionary meaning that it was not necessary to do an investigation if the stereotypes are well known. Utterance #C indicates that the maxim of relation is not violated. Speaker in #C did not say something that is irrelevant to the topic introduced in utterance #D. Following the maxim of relation is demonstrated in the Sepedi speaker’s ability to shift the topic to a much more relevant response in accordance with the change of focus in utterance #D. That is, the fact that the Sesotho speaker knew about witchcraft while she was home enabled the Sepedi speaker to counter this information spontaneously without being lost in the dialogue. By the same token, there is no evidence in the utterance that shows violation of the maxims of quantity, quality and manner. With this wide-ranging response to the utterance expressed in Sesotho, the Sepedi speaker’s linguistic repertoires are advanced to follow an argument (maxim of relations) and draw appropriate inferences from Sesotho utterances. Therefore, Sepedi speakers understand the Sesotho speakers in conversations and meaning making is cultivated beyond the boundaries between these varieties. The discussion of utterances A, B, C and D shows that the speaker who produced utterance # A (Sepedi) is fully understood by the speaker who produced utterance #B (Sesotho). Likewise, utterance # D demonstrates that the speaker (Sepedi) has a high command of the variety used in # C (Sesotho). The discussion has also shown that the speakers observe the maxim of relation, which is given prominence in marking degrees of mutual understanding. In both cases, Sesotho and Sepedi speakers have shown that they not only take the literary meaning from the speech, but they also read the illocutionary meanings and drew accurate inferences from the implicatures. These interactions allow a conclusion to be drawn that Sepedi and Sesotho are mutually intelligible and that their speakers can communicate without major linguistic barriers. Motswana and Mopedi The second sub-question on mutual intelligibility sought to investigate whether Setswana and Sepedi speakers mutually understand each other without major linguistic barriers. In order to illustrate the extent to which these groups understand each other, two episodes represented in utterances E and F, on the one hand, and G and H, on the other hand are used for illustrations. The first pair of interactions (#E and #F) shows the Setswana speaker’s (Motswana) level of understanding Sepedi: E (Mopedi): Bothata bjo bongwe ke gore go se ete ga batho go se etele dinaga tše dingwe ka mo ntle. O tle o kgone go bona le go kwešiša gore boloi bo mo a ga bo gona, bjalo ka ge ba re lesogana le le sa etego le nyala kgaetšedi.

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[Another problem is that people do not visit, they do not visit other communities outside theirs. So you can see and understand whether or not there is witchcraft because they say (quoting a proverb): “The young man who doesn’t visit marries his sister”]. F (Motswana): E, fela hjaka ga se fela mona ke beneng gore ke tswe kwa BokoneBophorima, fa Lehurutse Sefahlane ke tle fa, wa bona gore ke tsela e telle jang, ke bone gore ka ditsela tse dingwe ja ka o re batho ga ba ete, ka ditsela tse dingwe nka kgona gore ke tsebe bophelo ba Limpopo, ke se ke ka itsa ba ko Bokone-Bophirima feela. Fela ka ge ke ntse ke ipuetse gore ke batla gore a ke nnete boloi bo mo Limpopo bo a phela. [Yes, as I come from North-West at Lehurutse Sefahlane and came here, do you see how long the road is? I realized that as you say people do not visit, I visited so that I know about life in Limpopo and not confine my knowledge to North-West. But my issue is that I have already said that I needed to know (now that I am here) whether witchcraft exists in Limpopo].

The Sepedi respondent in utterance # E points out that lack of traveling experience is the major cause of ethnic stereotypes. The speaker argues that the stereotype about witchcraft in his home province Limpopo is exacerbated by the lack of traveling experience on the part of the Setswana-speaking respondents. A Sepedi proverb, “the young man who does not travel ends up marrying his sister” is cited to augment the point of committing errors of judgment. The Setswana speaker in utterance # F responds to this charge by telling the Sepedi speaker that she has traveled way over hundreds of miles from North-West, her home province, to come to Limpopo. Therefore, the idea of traveling experience expressed by the Sepedi interlocutor does not hold. In terms of the CPs, these interactions reveal a great deal of cooperation that requires a high degree of proficiency in the language varieties used. First, the maxim of relation is observed through the Setswana speaker in utterance #F. Without directly saying that the implication of Sepedi speaker in utterance #E is invalid, the Setswana speaker says that she is from a distant province and asks the Sepedi speaker in a question form to imagine the distance she travelled to the Limpopo province. This answer is not only relevant to counter the charge of the lack of traveling experience as the main cause for Setswana speakers to be stereotyped about the witchcraft practices in the Limpopo province, it also shows a high degree of understanding of the utterance expressed in #E. Likewise, it is true that the Setswana speaker comes from the Northwest province, and she gave sufficient information needed for the speaker in #E to get the idea that he was wrong in making the assumption about lacking travel experience. The maxims of quality and quantity were therefore observed. Even though the Sepedi speaker used a proverb to explain his point, it did not hinder understanding by the Setswana speaker (observation of the maxim of manner). In fact, the Setswana speaker shows that she understood the illocutionary meaning

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embedded in the proverb about the young man who marries a sister when she responds that she was then in a different province (Limpopo) from her own (North West). The Setswana speaker’s ability to observe the maxims of relation, quality, quantity and manner, and to make correct interpretation of the illocutionary meaning embedded in proverbs provide enough evidence that the Setswana speaker in utterance #F understands Sepedi speech represented in utterance #E. The next set of interactions was intended to show the degree to which the Sepedi speaker in utterance #H understands the Setswana speaker in utterance #G. G (Motswana): Go reng batho ba nale tlhaologanyo ya gore Limpopo go tletse boloi. Ee, nna ga ke gane gore boloi bo gona ko gohle. Le ko Lehurutse bo bontshi ko ke tswang. Ha o ka mpotsa ka bona nka ho hlalosetsa. Nna ke kopa fela hore le ntlhalosetseng gore ho reng Basotho ba na le hlaologanyo ya gore mo Bopedi go na le boloi, le Batswana ba nale hlaologanyo ya gore mo Bopedi ho na le boloi. [Why do people have the understanding that Limpopo is full of witchcraft practices? I do not deny that there is witchcraft everywhere. There is too much of these practices even in my hometown, Lehurutse. If you ask me about it, I will explain. I am only asking for explanations why both Sesotho and Setswana speaking communities have a common view that the Sepedi predominant area has a lot of witchcraft.] H (Mopedi): Le gotše ba le botša ka wona mokgwa woo. Ke di stereotype ke moka ge le fihla mokhi a le kgone go lebelela mathoko a rena a lokileng. Ge le fihla mo, le lebelela fela tše dimpe. E re ke go hlalošetše [You grew up being told it is so. It is stereotypical; when you arrive here, you do not look at our good sides. When you arrive here you are only looking for bad things [to confirm your stereotypes].

The Setswana utterance in #G begins his input to the conversation about witchcraft in Limpopo by asking a question why the idea of witchcraft is so dominant in the Limpopo province. This speaker gives a general view of witchcraft when pointing out that his own home town does have witchcraft practices (the belief in). However, the practices in the Limpopo province call for attention because they are so well known countrywide. This is the context in which Motswana above seeks some explanations from the people of Limpopo themselves. The response from the Sepedi speaker in #H is rather dismissive. This speaker points out that the reason these groups got to know about Limpopo witchcraft practices while they were still in their home provinces only shows the depth of the stereotype. This kind of stereotype is dangerous, according to Sepedi speaker in #H, because visitors from other provinces tend to overlook all other positive aspects of the Limpopo province. In other words, the speaker in #H feels that there is a need to correct these stereotypes instead of explaining why the stereotype is popular.

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Following the maxim of relation, the Sepedi utterance in #G has observed this maxim notwithstanding the fact that it is not a satisfying response to the question. The speaker in utterance #G needed to know about the popularity of witchcraft practices in Limpopo, and the respondent in #H argues that such popularity was instilled much earlier in the lives of Setswana speakers who think that there are witchcraft practices when there are none in practice. It appears a bit irrelevant in content, but the response was not irrelevant to the question posed in #G. Further, the Sepedi speaker articulates what he believes to be true: Setswana speakers were stereotyped while they were young in their home province. Added to the observation that Setswana speakers entered the conversation with background information that Limpopo has witchcraft practices, there is a truth-value in #H because Setswana speakers had only two weeks in the province to have knowledge about witchcraft practices believed to be predominant in the Limpopo province. Likewise, the information given in #H is as required to satisfy the question asked in #G. Both maxims of quality and quantity were, therefore, observed in this utterance. This Sepedi speaker’s ability to read the illocutionary meaning that suggested there is something particular about the witchcraft popularity in the province proves that #H has a high command of the utterances in #G at both literal and implied meanings. Taken together, the first set of interactions represented in utterances #E and #F have showed that the speaker in #F understands the utterance in #E through a close observation of the maxims of relation, quality, quantity, and manner as well as making appropriate inferences of the illocutionary meaning embedded even in localized speech forms like proverbs. In the same token, the second set of interactions showed that the speaker in #H understands the utterance in #G, and correctly inferred the illocutionary meaning that suggested that witchcraft is very special in Limpopo as opposed to other areas where Setswana and Sesotho speakers come from. As a result, the speaker in #H relevantly answered with sufficient information that satisfied the question posed in #G. Overall, these two sets of interactions allow an interpretation to be made that Setswana and Sepedi speakers mutually understand each other when engaged in two-language. Motswana and Mosotho The third research sub-question with regard to inter-dialect communication was to find out whether or not bi-dialect interaction between Setswana speakers and Sesotho speakers could proceed without major language barriers. The first part of this analysis focused on the extent to which Setswana speakers understand the utterances made by Sesotho speakers. This set of interactions is presented in utterances # I and # J below:

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I (Mosotho): Janong nna ke kopa ho botsa hore ha ele hore ke mosadi wa Motswana wo utlwang le yena ha ka ho roba pelo o tla kgotlella o utlwane le mosadi wo mongwe wa Motswana hape o ntse o le Motswana jwalo. Jwanong why ha ele hore ke mosadi was Mosotho o sa kgotlellane le Mosotho o mong hape? [As for me, I need to question that if it is a Motswana woman who gets hurt you will get another Motswana woman because you are Motswana. Then, why do not you do the same (tolerating) if you are married to a Mosotho woman (in other words why are not you treating the two ethnic groups equally?) J (Motswana): Tle ke go arabe. Ke bo stereotype. O ka se ke wa bolella monna wa Mosotho ka hore ke monna wa Mosotho ke morafe o mobe. Ke se se bakang bo stereotype, ga se kotsi ke se se sebediswang jwalo. [Let me answer you. This is stereotype. You will not ask that to a Mosotho man because a Mosotho man is a bad ethnic grouping (that is, you will not think the Sesotho speaking men are as bad as you now think of Setswana speaking men). This is what causes stereotype; it is not accidental, it is how things work out].

The speaker in utterance #I attempts to find out why women of different ethnic groups would be treated differently if they were married to one man at different times. The context of this question is that a Motswana male respondent had said that if he were married to a Setswana-speaking woman, and they got into marital problems that eventually breaking the marriage, he would likely marry another Setswana-speaking woman. On the contrary, if he were married to a Sesotho-speaking woman, and they got into exactly the same problems, he would not marry another Sesotho speaking woman. The question from utterance # I concerned the unequal treatment of marital problems based on the woman’s language background. The response from the Setswana speaker who happened to be a woman respondent in #J provides an answer that shows how deep both groups live with stereotypes. This respondent acknowledges that their deep belief systems about themselves and other ethnic groups do cause stereotypes that have permeated their societies. With regard to the CP, there is an observation of all the four maxims in the utterance: Relation, quality, quantity and manner. First, the respondent in #J begins with a relevant answer to the question posed in utterance # I. The speaker in utterance #J relevantly states with confidence: “Let me answer you. It is stereotype” when asked by the speaker in #I on the question of why two women of different language backgrounds would be treated differently in exactly the same condition. In order to explain the stereotype phenomenon, this speaker tells the respondent in utterance# I that she (#J) would not complain about Sesothospeaking men or think of them as being unfair when they do not marry a Setswana-speaking woman after the failed marriage with the Setswana-speaking

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woman. This satisfies the maxim of relation. The maxims of quality, quantity and manner have also been observed. For example, it is true that a bad experience with one encounter from one ethnic group might breed stereotypes that force one to withdraw completely from the ethnic group as opposed to one’s own ethnic group where there might be more attempts. The response by the speaker in #J is succinct, correct and devoid of obscure expressions. In addition to the observation of the four maxims under CP, the speaker in #J showed an ability to explicate implicatures in utterance #I. The speaker in utterance # J made appropriate inferences of this illocutionary meaning that Sesotho men are biased and then responded directly to it instead of the locutionary one that was not intended by the speaker in utterance #I. Therefore, the speaker in utterance #J’s ability to read the intention of the utterance in #I allows the interpretation that Setswana speaker in utterance #J understands both the locutionary and illocutionary meanings of the Sesotho speaker in utterance #I. Observably, the idiomatic expression “ho robja pelo”, meaning ‘to break the heart’ did not hinder the interpretation arrived at by the respondent in utterance #J. It was interpreted accurately within the context of the marriage breakup. The second set of interactions were analyzed to show whether the Sesotho speakers, apart from being understood by the Setswana speakers as shown in utterances #I and #J above, have a high degree of intelligibility to make appropriate judgments about utterances produced by Setswana speakers. Utterances #K and #L below exemplify a prototypical interaction pattern: #K (Motswana): Ne ke kopa ho hlalohanya gore mantatale ke eng. [I was asking to understand what “mantatale” is.] #L (Mosotho): Mantatale ke ngatha tsa pere ngwaneso [Manatale are the horse hoofs, my sibling (used as a term of endearment).

The speaker in utterance #K asks a question that needs clarification on an unfamiliar concept “mantatale” (horse hoof) used previously by the speaker in utterance #L. This question is presented in an indirect way that the hearer who does not have a full understanding may not interpret it as a question. The indirect question formulated as a request made in utterance #K (“I was asking to understand . . . ”), was given due attention by the speaker in utterance #L. The speaker in #L uses a term of endearment “my sibling”, and explains that the concept, mantatale, means the horse hooves. In terms of the maxim of relation, a number of factors need explaining. First, the utterance in #L is relevant to the expression made in utterance #K because it gave an explanation of the concept, mantatale, as expected by the speaker in

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utterance #K. Secondly, the speaker in utterance #L relevantly interpreted the statement of request as an honest need for further clarification usually by someone who is less knowledgeable. To this end, she deemed it fit to use the word of endearment, “my sibling” in order to establish rapport. These factors involved in the response indicate that the maxim of relation is observed in this utterance. Similarly, the answer in #L was straight to the point, devoid of obscure expressions, and accurate on the definition of mantatale. Beyond observation of all the CP maxims in utterance #L, the speaker in utterance #L demonstrates high command of direct and indirect forms of questioning from the dialect used in utterance # K. The illocutionary meaning of the statement “what is mantatale” was correctly inferred and responded to in a succinct way. To do this, one would need a high command of understanding in the dialect of the expression used to draw correct inferences and to provide accurate answers. The interactions between Setswana and Sesotho speakers showed that the speaker in utterance #I was understood by the speaker in utterance # J irrespective of the idiomatic expression used by the speaker in #I. The speaker in #J observed all the CP maxims and demonstrated the ability to make inferences of illocutionary meanings embedded in utterance #I. Similarly, the second set of interactions showed that the speaker in utterance # L understood the contents and implications of the utterance in #K. The speakers’ ability to provide relevant answers that are devoid of obscurity and their ability to infer implicatures to arrive at the illocutionary meanings denote that the Setswana speaker in utterance # J understands the Sesotho utterance in #I in the same way that the Sesotho speaker in utterance #L understands the Setswana utterance in #K. This allows the interpretation that Setswana and Sesotho are mutually intelligible varieties. In brief, the discussion on bi-dialect interactions between Sepedi, Setswana, and Sesotho speakers showed that there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility that cuts across dialect differences. Observation of the CP maxims: relations, quality, quantity, manner and circumlocution as well as accurate inferences of the implicatures: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary force, as discussed, provide sufficient evidence that there were no linguistic barriers in conversations carried out in three different language varieties.

6.3.2 Three-language interaction: Conversational repairs While the questions on mutual intelligibility were answered in interactions # A through #L above, the analysis went further to draw cases of three-language interactions to assess degrees of mutual intelligibility when three speakers of different varieties are involved in a dialogue. The analysis showed that there were

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conversational repairs and a smooth flow of the topics from one speaker to another. The following interaction demonstrates the strategy used to repair the conversation at the brink of breakdown: #A (Motswana): O ka re ba e tsea hore re nyefola Bapedi. Ha re nyegole re batla ho hlalohanya. [It looks like they think we are ridiculing Sepedi speakers. We do not ridicule; we need to understand. #B (Mopedi): Ee, lebaka la gore lena le jese pudi leotša ke gore ga le nyakišiše. Ke gore ditaba tša lena le dikwa go tšwa mothong o motee. [Yes, it is because you generalize (literal meaning of the proverb: to let goats eat millets) without investigating. #C (Mosotho): Ho jesa pudi leotsa ke eng? [What does letting goats eat millets mean?] #B (Mopedi): Ke stereotype go fetetša ka Sepedi. [It means stereotype when translated in Sepedi]

In this interaction, there is a flow of ideas from one speaker to another. The Setswana speaker starts with an apologetic statement that they were not ridiculing Sepedi speakers about witchcraft. Their goal was rather to understand the depth of witchcraft in the Limpopo province. Secondly, the Sepedi speaker understood the apology and explained using a proverb that they (Sepedi group) felt personally attacked. The use of the proverb that translates “to make goats eat millets” brought in the third group of speakers into the discussion: Sesotho speakers. The Sesotho speaker sought clarification on the use of this proverb; otherwise she would miss the gist of the argument. The Sepedi speaker again was prompted to explain that the proverb simply meant the act of generalizing. In brief, the three speakers understand each other on the main focus of the discussion: the generalization that there is a lot of witchcraft in Limpopo. This satisfies the maxim of relation, quantity, and quality. Violation of the maxim of manner through the use of obscure expression by the Sepedi speaker nearly resulted in a communication breakdown. It is, however, noteworthy that the speakers were able to repair their conversations when such expressions were used. The speakers were able to use neutral expressions to explain dialect-specific phrases as seen in #L on the concept mantatale in order to bring the conversation back to a mutually intelligible level. The flow of the topic across three dialects and the speakers’ ability to repair their conversations show that the speakers in

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this interaction communicate in ways that are similar to speakers of the same language. In conclusion, there were no linguistic barriers observed in the tridialect interactions; instead, a strategy of repairs was used to ensure the smooth flow of the conversation, as is usually the case among native speakers of one language.

6.3.3 Three-language interaction: Mutual inter-comprehensibility Another example of three-language interaction that showed a smooth flow of the topic across the three dialect utterances was analyzed further to demonstrate the degree of mutual comprehension when the speakers are using their respective dialects in the same communicative event. #A (Mopedi): Ke kgopela go botšiša ka ye ya boloi, ntho ye ya boloi le tsebile ka yona ge le tloga gae goba le tsebile ka yona ge le fihla mo. [I request to ask about the witchcraft one, did you know about this witchcraft issue when you were still at your homes, or did you get to know about it once you arrived here?] #B (Mosotho): Ha ke tswa hae ne ke sa tsebe selo ka Limpopo, ne ke sa tsebe letho ne ke tseba hore ho nale Province entsha e bitswa Northern Province ebitswang Limpopo eseng e tshentshilwe lebitso, ha ele tsa boli be teng ke ne ke sa di tsebe. Ke utlwile ha ke fihla mona. [When I came home I did not know anything about Limpopo (the province believed to have witchcraft practices). What I knew was that there is a new name attached to the Northern Province called Limpopo. I virtually knew nothing about witchcraft.] #A (Mopedi): O dirile eng ge o tseba ka taba ye ya boloi? [Upon understanding that there is witchcraft, what did you do?] # B (Mosotho): Ke a botsa. Tjhe ha ke re gabotse nna ke tsebile ha ke tloha hae hore mo Limpopo boloi bo teng ke bo bontshi? [I asked. No actually; I knew that there is a lot of witchcraft practice in Limpopo when I left home.] # A (Mopedi): Ke bona bothata bona bo ka gore o tlogile ka gae ba go botsa gore boloi Limpopo ke bo bontshi. Jwale wena was tseba ge o tloga gae hore Limpopo ke boloing ke bothata ba gona. Le tswa ka magaeng a bolena le tseba gore mo Limpopo dilo tse dimpe ke tse dintshi goba boloi ke bo bontshi le tse dingwe. [That is the problem because you left home already with the information that there is a lot of witchcraft in Limpopo. Leaving home with this knowledge is the root cause of the problem. You left your hometowns knowing that here in Limpopo there are so many bad things or that there is too much witchcraft and other negative things.]

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#C (Motswana): Ee, re tlogile re ntse re itse gore boloi bo teng. Re tlohile re ntse re itse ne re batla go netefatsa hore a naa ke nnete boloi bo teng ko Limpopo ke mo re tlileng gompieno. [Yes, we left home with full knowledge that there is witchcraft. We came with the knowledge; we just want to confirm if there is witchcraft in Limpopo; that is why we are here today.]

This interaction shows a discussion that was initiated by the Sepedi-speaking respondent. This respondent asked a question if the belief that the Limpopo province had witchcraft practices developed while the other discussants were in their hometowns or if it emerged in the two weeks following their arrival in Limpopo. The Sesotho respondent first stated that she did not know anything while she was at home, but later said that she had prior knowledge about witchcraft in Limpopo. The Sepedi respondent then used this latter point to make a case that prior knowledge had played a role in cultivating the stereotype among the respondents from the sister dialects. The Setswana-speaking respondent, on the other hand, said that he had prior knowledge about witchcraft in Limpopo; he only needed to confirm what he already knew before coming to Limpopo. The conversations in the above interactions proceeded smoothly from speakers of one dialect to another. All the CP maxims were observed in the interactions: relation, quality, quantity and manner so that the speakers remained focused on the same topic of witchcraft and the source of stereotypes about the Limpopo province. Therefore, in addition to the bi-dialect interactions discussed above, interactions showed high levels of mutual understanding across the three language groups.

6.4 Cognitively demanding task The same participants who were engaged in the focus group discussion were given an information gap task in order to evaluate whether the three Sotho groups could reach a communicative goal and resolve problems while using their respective varieties. The chief focus of this activity was not to assess mutual intelligibility, per se; it sought to evaluate the degree of intelligibility with regard to the speakers’ ability to resolve conflicts and cooperate in reallife situations. The three groups were presented with different problems that required that they compete for the orange, which was imagined to be the only one remaining. In this hypothetical context, the Sepedi group had to find a solution that they needed only the rind for the sick Queen; the Setswana needed the pips for the farmer, and the Sesotho group needed the juice from the orange

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for the sick water engineer. They had to discover what exactly they needed from the orange and how they could get it without making their counterparts lose anything. The conversation took approximately one hour and had interactions that in the end brought a win-win situation for all the groups, which relates to the idea of unity and harmonization. The following extracts illustrate the speaker’s problem-solving skills while communicating with speakers who do not speak the same variety. # (Sesotho): Puo ya hae ha ke e utlwisisse ka hore wena ha re utlwisise wena le Batswana ba bang ba re le batla namune kaofela, rapolase wa lona kappa yena . . . o itse le tle le yona kaofela la kgutla la re ditholana fela. Laborarao jwalo le re le batla namune kaofela. Hantle hantle le re le batlang? [Your talk is not understandable because you and other Setswana speakers say you need the whole orange. Did your farmer tell you to bring the whole orange or just the pips? You said that you need just the pips later one. Thirdly, you tell us that you need the whole orange. What do you really need?]

In this extract, the Sesotho-speaking participant analyzed the demands made by Setswana speakers in their quest to get the orange. This respondent is able to show that the Setswana speakers moved in three positions. First, they claimed that they needed the whole orange. Next, they said that they needed just the pips, and then reverted to the original demand. The Sesotho respondent finds this change of positions confusing and harder to resolve. Importantly, the Sesotho respondent is able to synthesize main issues presented by Setswana group and show that the solution to the problem is unlikely to be reached as long as the Setswana speakers keep changing positions. The Setswana respondent complicates the problem further by making a demand to bring together all the key individuals for whom the cases were made: the traditional healer (for the sick Queen), the doctor (for the sick water engineer) and the farmer as presented in the following extract: #A (Motswana): Kitso ya rona ya gore namune gore re jwale re batla ditholwana ga re itse se rapolase a se batlang, janong se se siameng ke gore Queen Modjadjai a ka fodiswa ke namune a tle mo. Motho war eng rra Badiki a ka fodiswa ke namune a tle mo. [Our knowledge about growing oranges through pips is limited, as we do not know exactly what the farmer wants. Then whoever said Queen Modjadji would be healed by an orange should come here. The person who said the technician would be healed by an orange should also come here.]

As illustrated in this extract, the respondent says that they do not know if the farmer just needed the pips. Consequently, the respondents would like to have

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the traditional healer who prescribed the orange healing remedy for Queen Modjadji to come along and the doctor who claimed that the water technician could be cured by an orange should also come over so that they could both be interrogated. This demand, however, makes it impractical to bring the imagined people to the discussion table. In this regard, a Sepedi speaker intervenes with a proposal that proved worthwhile in the end. The proposal is represented in the extract below: #B (Mopedi): Le a tseba gore ke nagana gore re dire eng. Akere ka moka re nyaka namune, re ka e ngatha mo gare rena (Bapedi) ra tšea seripa se sengwe, Basotho ba tšea seripa se sengwe lena la tsea dithapo (Batswana) la di bjala, kgoši a nesa pula, rra tegnieki a ntšha meetsi dinamune tša mela – ge a lwala a ja dinamune. [You know what I think we should do. Because we all need the orange, we can cut it in the middle so that we (Sepedi speakers) take one piece, the Sesotho speaking group takes another piece, and you (Setswana-speaking group) take the pips to grow them, the queen will bring about rain, the technician will bring about water for the orange trees to grow – when he’s sick, he could eat oranges].

The Sepedi respondent proposed that they cut the orange into two pieces. Sepedi group would take one piece, the Sesotho group take another part while Setswana group would take the pips. The farmer would plant the pips; the rain Queen Modjadji could be healed to assume her spiritual obligations of bringing rain, and then the technician would have even have more water on the ground. He would eat the orange when he is sick and pump more water for the people affected by drought. The last response brought the discussion to a close: the Sepedi takes one part of the orange with the rind, the Sesotho group takes away one part that has some juice while both groups give away the pips to the Setswana group. This proved satisfactory for each group that initially wanted to have the whole orange. The participants realized that they needed each other much more than they had thought in the beginning of the conversation. Based on the shift from wanting the whole orange to sharing in ways that complement one another, the goal of this conversation was reached. This allows an interpretation that speakers of these dialects not only have mutual understanding as the focus group discussions have demonstrated, they also have the ability to reach a communicative goal. Because reaching a communicative goal requires a high degree of mutual understanding, it is further concluded that the harmonized form of Sotho could allow speakers of these three dialects to perform other social functions that require high-level negotiations.

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6.5 Expanded social identities Looking at the degrees of mutual inter-comprehensibility established in the preceding sections of this chapter, it is pivotal to consider not only the linguistic resemblances of the speakers, but their discursive sense of who they are. The conversational analyses show that these African languages overlap and defy the boundaries that were created between the speakers. While they may not view themselves as belonging to a clustered language due to the physical and ideological boundaries that were imposed on them, it would seem that their repertoires still denote a sense of a large community of speakers whose varieties are embedded into one another. This is also an indicator of a possibility of multiple voices coming into contact in the post-Apartheid state where movements between these groups have been uplifted. Beyond this possibility, what is clear is that these languages have never been so distinctly different and the conversations show a retained social practice of mutual inter-comprehensibility.

6.6 Conclusion This chapter has shown that historical divisions of Sotho languages by both colonial nation statism and Apartheid’s practices of separate development have not affected mutual inter-comprehensibility. The experiment of putting speakers of the Sotho language varieties in the same speech event to infer meanings in a stretch of conversations has provided evidence of shared language. The speakers were also able to resolve complex problems such as information gap. With regard to the problem solving ability, the research revealed that Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana speakers are able to use each of these languages to perform cognitively demanding tasks. This means that the speakers can be engaged in educational endeavours where they can evaluate, synthesise, interpret content in any of the codes at their disposal. Linking up their ability to read and comprehend any text within the Sotho cluster, here we show that the speakers are able to have conversations and reason at the highest level possible. Taken together, these comprehension and discourse overlaps across the three language varieties point to one conclusion: they are mutually intelligible and the speakers understand and are understood by their interlocutors beyond the boundaries of the current codes.

Chapter 7 Beyond boundaries to full linguistic repertoires I use the label “kasi-taal” to refer to evolved forms of both Iscamtho and Flaaitaal/Tsotsitaal in order to account for weakening boundaries between Sotho, Nguni, Afrikaans and English language forms and to understand how its speakers, who claim kasi-taal as their home language, redefine their identities. (Makalela, 2013, p. 111)

7.1 Introduction It is often believed that complex multilingualism is a feature of urbanization and that most of the remote rural villages have ‘pure’ monolingual speakers. This notion reflects an ideology of one-ness and purity that defined both the European Enlightenment period (Ricento, 2000) and linguistic Apartheid in South Africa. In this chapter I discuss both the village and the township factors in multilingualism and illustrate that both contexts are mirrors of each other. The first part addresses the movement of people from one village to the next and the second part discusses features of blended languages use, typical in periurban South Africa.

7.2 Inbound and outbound village mobility The use of languages in South Africa has always been very complex, dynamic and boundary-crossing. The extract above indicates an organic translanguaging phenomenon in African languages blend and overlap with both Afrikaans and English as part of speakers’ full linguistic repertoires.

My Language biography While growing up in a small village of Leboeng, which is sandwiched between the great mountains of Mantshwe, JG Stridjdom Tunnel and the echo caves at the border of what is known today as Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces, I have always seen, heard and conversed with many people who spoke in different tongues. I remember speakers of Xitsonga, Tshivenda and Swati vividly who were an integral part of my community that spoke a variety Sepedi. The elderly referred to themselves as Basotho (speakers of Sesotho) even though in reality, the spoken language had a mixture of words from other languages. Those who spoke unusual combination of sounds from different languages were called mahlakano (the mix). Indeed it was not uncommon to have surnames such as Mkhondo (Xitsonga), Mnisi (Zulu), Nkwane (Swati) and nicknames such as chakarampa (from Venda). The village had all these languages and had always been in a state of transition- people coming in and out. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614515067-007

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When my uncles came back from Johannesburg, I would hear Zulu words such as mchana (niece). Also, we heard more Setswana words such as tota tota (in fact) and a hybrid language in Johannesburg townships that was known to us as tsotsitaal. These were picked up from the hybrid spaces in which they worked in the mines and construction companies in Johannesburg and in my village these were markers of being a laiti (an enlightened one) who were exposed to the ‘lights’ of Johannesburg. My village was also surrounded by Swati speakers, which was mainly found in the nearby farms. I learned from my grandmother that Swatis have always been in our proximity. The initiation songs and ancestral spirit songs would be heard as part of our communal musical repertoire. Because of this mixing of people, the villagers had poetry tradition, which depicted earlier movements and identification of one’s place of origin . It didn’t really make sense to me in my early teenage years when I heard the renditions, yet I knew that it was an established custom found in a variety of ceremonies. They were in mixed words from different languages. Knowledge of so many tongues was highly regarded with prestige and as an embodiment of wisdom in the village. In the farms nearby by the village, one of the white farmers’ names was makhahlelane, which is a Swati name for ‘attacking’. He received this name from the farm workers who were responding to his sporadic attacks towards the farm workers, without provocation. Makhahlelane had a foreman named ingobiyane (which means a monkey in Swati) because he would be excited at the thought of eating a monkey meat, typically after the animal was gunned down by Makhahlelane. Makhahlelane always gave his instructions to his workers in Afrikaans and some of the workers would talk back to him in their language-mainly Swati as he had some basic vocabulary in the language. In brief, I have always been exposed to many language varieties and these were a part of me and that’s how I made sense of the world around me. My village was some sort of a melting pot for language varieties such as Xitsonga, Tshivenda, Swati, Sepedi and Afrikaans. I rarely heard English spoken in my village except that it was used as a language of learning and teaching from Grade 4. isZulu and Setswana came in through makarapa –those who worked in Gauteng. Leketi’s language biography

Many South Africans are accustomed to receiving input in one language and to give a different output in a different language. In the vignette above, the biographer reveals a typical village that has undergone transitions from pre-colonial era, where movements and continuous acquisition of language varieties in different spaces was highly regarded. In particular the mixture of languages from a wide array of current language clusters in South Africa signifies a pre-colonial stage where tribal nationalism did not inhibit either movement or dialogues across language differences. We also gather from the vignette that during the Apartheid period where farm working brought about people from different backgrounds, grouping of people according to the language varieties they spoke did not impact heavily in creating language silos. The farms still provided opportune spaces for multilingual conversations that included the language of the farmers. Dr HF Vervoerd’s

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decree that those who spoke different languages should stay in different quarters was not effective for villages and communities that were already integrated in 1953- the year of Vervoerd’s pronouncement. The vignette also show outward and inward mobility of the village men who went as far as the City of Johannesburg to eke out a living. When they returned, they had acquired more vocabulary from different parts of the country. The Black townships, where they resided as temporary spaces of work gave them a space to use even more hybrid township variety, tsotsi-taal, which meant the language of the ‘tsotsi’ (a Sestwana word for someone living in the underworld). As will be discussed below, tsotsitaal became a language code for protest against Apartheid among the males who were separated from their families by the prescribed working conditions where family members were not allowed to stay within the work precinct. People who were found in and around Johannesburg without work permits were imprisoned and charged with trespassing. Because of these restrictive working and living conditions, the Gauteng workers had to return to their villages once or twice a year to meet with family and in this process they brought back to the village tsotsi-taal or mixed language repertoire. In these multilingual discursive practices, languages are integrated in single meaning units and used seamlessly in large continuous stretch of discourses. As a result of this communicative pattern, the traditional language boundaries in these highly multilingual and hybrid communities become blurred and give way to the emergence of new language forms that are unbounded and embedded into one another.

7.3 Post-apartheid mobility- reintegration South Africa is no different from the language in motion status of the 21st C. It has experienced a new wave of people mobility, which started with the new socio-political dispensation of 1994 that precipitated freedom of movement within its borders. The majority of these movements were seen in the urban centres where local migrants flocked to eke out a living and desert former Bantustan homelands in the rural areas. Beyond this, there has also been a large number of migrants from the neighbouring African countries such as Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Botswana. The first port of entry for both rural and out-side of the border immigrants has always been the Black townships. Necessarily, this unprecedented immigration expanded traditional bases of the townships, which were geographically and linguistically demarcated prior to 1994. The result has been that a typical township, referred to as

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ekasi (township), has become a new site of linguistic contact between linguistic communities that were previously separated from one another. When framed in this light, it follows that South Africa becomes a microcosm of super-diversity with spatio-temporal complexes that define global movements of the 21st century (Mignolo, 2000).

7.4 Translocal and transnational mobilities There seems no doubt that migration patterns towards developed countries and translocal movements through rapid urbanization have created new sites of linguistic and identity negotiation in the 21st century, which characterize critical sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert, 2010). This new changes the pin the linguistic outputs of the South African, has required new ways of thinking about multilingual speakers’ use of more than one linguistic code in their everyday way of speaking. These increased movements of people between and within nation states have correspondingly resulted in movements of languages and shifting of traditional boundaries (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007; Pennycook, 2017; Makoni and Mashiri, 2007; Creese and Blackledge, 2010). This new development has spurred interest among sociolinguists who started shifting their attention to language and mobility in super-diverse communities. The concept, ‘superdiversity’ was originally used to refer to new European communities that have recent immigrants with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds in settlement spaces of less than 10 years. However, Creese and Blackledge (2010) remind us that new diversity is not limited to . . . .new migrants who arrived in the last decade, but includes changing practices and norms in established migrant (and non-migrant) groups, as daughters and sons, granddaughters and grand-sons, great-grand-daughters and great-grand-sons of immigrants (an non migrants) negotiate their place in their changing world (P. 550)

In this new diversity context, the intermeshing and interweaving of a number of factors create a post-migration experience that sets aside regional, ethnic, cultural and linguistic characteristics of particular groups in favour of a more hybrid habitus (Heller, 2007). To describe multilingual practices in the post-migration communities, sociolinguists move away from treatment of languages as hermetically sealed units (see Makoni and Mashiri, 2007) to appraisal of merging boundaries between traditional linguistic codes and use of discursive linguistic resources in functionally integrated ways. To this end, a large body of scholarship has identified

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globalized communication practices as those involving a constant merger of translocal, transcultural and transnational use of languages when multilinguals engage in their everyday way of meaning making and identifying in their new settlement spaces (e.g., Blommaert; 2010; Heller, 2007; Hornberger and Link, 2012). This includes new language inventions. Accordingly, this new type of communication is best explained as spatio-temporally complex as one language can no longer be tied to space and time. Here, multilingual speakers are engaged in negotiation of multiple identities, which cut across traditional language boundaries and keep making choices in defining who they want to become (Garcia, 2009, 2011). This global languaging trend thus calls for a detailed research on linguistic complexity in local situations under the notion that can best be described as the sociolinguistics of mobility.

7.5 From tsotsitaal and iscamtho to kasi-taal Our discussion above showed that tsotsi-taal is a hybrid language form that combines different language varieties into a single linguistic code, which allows for speakers of traditionally bounded languages engage in conversations without efforts. Also stated that this form was largely associated with isolated males in the Black townships (semi-urban reserves) such as Soweto. Previous research has described Black township hybrid language forms under the labels such as Flaaitaal, Tsotsitaal and Iscamtho (see works by Childs 1997; Makhudu 2002; Ntshangase 2002). In the literature, Flaaitaal, which means “street-” or “smart language”, and Tsotsitaal, which means “language of a thug”, have been used interchangeably to refer to a mixture of African languages and Afrikaans in the 1950s. Both flaaitaal and tsotsitaal were largely seen as languages used by male criminals who became militant and generally unhappy with the conditions imposed on them by Apartheid. These include isolating them from their families and appalling working conditions (Makalela 2013). In this connection, these language varieties were used in resistance and defiance campaigns against the government and became the secret codes of communication. We learn from Makhudu’s (1995, 2002) work that Iscamtho, on the other hand, is derived from Nguni language groups (later used by Sotho language groups) to describe a hybrid language of the Amalaita criminal network in the early 1900s (see also Ntshangase 2002). As different from Flaaitaal and Tsotsitaal, Iscamtho emphasizes the mixture of language use between African languages. Over time, both urban varieties were re-appropriated by their users as markers of urban identity and of being street-wise (Makalela, 2013). We also observe that in the post-apartheid era, the differences between these forms are

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increasingly disappearing, as can be seen in an example such as “heitha” as in “heitha Comrade Madiba” (Makhudu 2002; Ntshangase 2002). The hybrid language forms used in the township have always been viewed negatively in terms of social behaviour such as thuggery, with little emphasis on the social protest side against Apartheid. I previously argued that these labels are inappropriate in the post-apartheid era and renamed the variety as kasi-taal, as the current users would name it. Below is the rationale for renaming: I use the label “kasi-taal” to refer to evolved forms of both Iscamtho and Flaaitaal/Tsotsitaal in order to account for weakening boundaries between Sotho, Nguni, Afrikaans and English language forms and to understand how its speakers, who claim kasi-taal as their home language, redefine their identities. (Makalela, 2013, p. 111)

Whereas linguistic analyses of these varieties have been documented, interpretations have been confined within the premise of languages as sets of autonomous skills, we re-interpret kasi-taal as a discursive resource that is fluid, versatile, and flexible to accommodate speakers of different language backgrounds. In this regard, kasi-taal, which means a language of the location or township, is preferred to emphasize the weakening boundaries between languages in space rather than to refer to a social behaviour as the previous labels suggested. When framed in this light, one can see the current kasi-taal practices as reflective of heteroglossic speech where there is an overlap between traditional language boundaries.

7.6 Translanguaging practices Sociolinguistic of mobility frames the notion of translanguaging, which is used to describe complex sociolinguistics realities of multilingual speakers who shift between languages in context (Garcia, 2011). According to Baker (2011), translanguaging has originally entailed a pedagogic practice where one receives an input in one language and gives output through the medium of another language in order to maximize learning, promote fuller understanding of the subject matter, and help develop the weaker language. This practice has increasingly caught the imagination of educational linguists about the prospects of using two or more languages in the same lesson and, in this way, moving away from the 20th century negative attitudes that learning or using more than one language causes mental confusion (Baker, 2011). Classroom translanguaging has been studied in various parts of the world as a new framework that shifts lens from cross-linguistic influence to how multilinguals intermingle linguistic features that are assigned to a particular language

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(Hornberger and Link, 2012). Well-known studies were conducted in complementary schools in the UK to assess the pedagogic efficacy of translanguaging in multilingual classrooms. Separate studies by Creese and Blackledge (2010) and Wei (2011) have found that allowing students to use their linguistic resources creates positive experience at school and maximizes pedagogic and cognitive benefits. In South Africa, emerging studies by Madiba (2014) and Makalela (2014) have shown cognitive advantages in literacy and language classes at two tertiary institutions, University of Cape Town and Wits University. Beyond classroom, which is not the focus of this paper, translanguaging was extended to include all discursive resources that apply among multilingual speakers in their everyday way of communicating (Garcia, 2009). Outside of the classroom, translanguaging research has deals with cognitive, contextual and cultural aspects of multilingual communication (Baker, 2011). Black townships in Johannesburg are an embodiment of translanguaging practices outside of classroom. Since the dawn of the new political dispensation that started in 1994, more Black communities have moved into ekasis in Johannesburg in search of better living conditions. As stated earlier, a large portion of these movements comprised people from former Bantustan homelands that were linguistically separated and a new wave of migrants from member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Noteworthy, however, there is dearth of research that investigates translanguaging outside of classroom to assess cognitive and social dimensions of multilingual speakers in their natural habitus.

7.7 Kasi-taal research Research on kasi-taal is in its infancy. Limited studies relied on data generated over a period of two years from two sources, university students and high school students who live in the Black townships around the city of Johannesburg (Makalela 2013; Nkadimeng and Makalela 2015). The goal of these study projects was to explore post-independent linguistic practices in the townships to gauge whether the linguistic boundaries between the 11 official languages are sustained in the new socio-political dispensation that precipitated movements and social reintegration.

a. Post-apartheid township There are more than 25 townships in Gauteng Province, which include Soweto, Tembisa, Alexandra, Mamelodi, Katlehong, Sharpeville, Kwathema and

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Mabopane (see Figure 1). These townships are home to the majority of the people who live in Gauteng. Soweto is particularly known for being a trendsetter that led to the 1976 Student Uprising and it is also known as the political home of South African veterans of the struggle against Apartheid. They include Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Current studies on kasi-taal interactions focused on Soweto, Tembisa, Alexandra, Katlehong and Daveyton.

Figure 1: Townships. (Source: Makalela 2013)

In various databases, Soweto study participants reported that they had exposure to at least 11 of the official languages in South Africa. Tembisa reported having been exposed to at least 12 languages and made a distinction between Shangaan in Mozambique and Xitsonga in South Africa even though in reality these two language forms are mutually intelligible. Alexander reported a proficiency of 13 languages spoken in the townships while Daveyton and Katlehong reported knowledge of 11 and 12 languages, respectively. The majority of the

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participants reported that their mother tongue was kasi-taal, a hybrid form of many languages that include Afrikaans, English, Nguni and Sotho languages and did not see identifying with any of the 9 indigenous African languages as suitable for their complex language backgrounds. Another biographical information here is that the majority of the participants acquired the languages before the age of 6, and they already spoke at least three languages fluently by the time they started school. Their participation in the study was the result of a purposeful sampling design that used belonging or having their homes in the townships as a selection criterion. It was expected that they would form an ideal group of participants to provide rich information about the status of language practices in these areas. These participants had exposure to almost all the 11 official languages as well as cross-border varieties of Sotho (Lesotho, Botswana) and Nguni (Swaziland, Zimbabwe) and Tonga (Mozambique) languages.

b. Types of data Self-recorded were collected from the students over a period of five days. After the students were exposed to basic sociolinguistic concepts and youth varieties as part of the course content in a sociolinguistics class at the university, they were asked to capture recent conversational events in which they had dialogues with their peers on campus. This activity was based on their ability to recall as much details of the conversation as possible. Where recall was not possible, they were asked to begin new conversation events that would reflect natural ways in which they usually speak to their peers. The participants used their cell-phones to record their own speech events for the whole week and then chose one dialogue set, which they submitted to the researcher. They carried out the task in pairs and as far as possible with students they have had such recent interactions. Having agreed to have their dialogues reviewed and used for research purposes, the instructor collected and sifted the dialogues on the basis of the criterion (township home stead) from a total pool of 60 dialogue sets. The dialogues were read twice by three independent readers with knowledge of the majority of indigenous African languages and experience of the township life. Themes from the dialogues were deduced using a universalist reductionist approach. The second phase of the analysis was discourse-based, focusing on instances of language mix or shift to identify and develop patterns of hybridity within and between utterances or thought units. The utterances were quoted to support the main themes observed throughout the conversations.

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7.8 Kasi-taal expressions The results of the study are organized into five themes: linguistic flexibility, social sensitivity, imagined communities, multi-greetings, merged Sotho varieties and rule govern-ness. These were reported in various publications on the subject (e.g., Makalela 2013). Although there is an explicit identification and analysis of words and phrases in the data presented, it is important to bear in mind that these are all perceived as repertoires driven by meaning-making rather than formation of linguistic structures.

Linguistic flexibility The results of the study showed that kasi-taal speakers have an extended repertoire of languages that they pool together to fit their communication needs. They displayed linguistic flexibility, which suggests a case of versatile intermingling of language resources rather than static and separated codes. Extract 1 below shows this flexibility: Extract 1 A: Ai baba. Yini ngawe? What is your problem? Hawu. B: Maybe you are right man, yazi.

Here, Speaker A begins the conversation in isiZulu when emphatically responding with Ai baba for “hey man”. Characteristically, baba means ‘father’, but it is used in this case as a token of endearment. The question, “what is your problem?” is preceded by its isiZulu version, yini ngawe and followed by another isiZulu surprise marker, Hawu! Then Speaker B, responds to their previous point (not in the script) in English and isiZulu within the same utterance: “Maybe you are right, yazi (You know).” This conversation shows a typical case where two multilingual speakers choose languages that are embedded into one another to communicate and carry out social functions. Speaker A processes a stream of thoughts by alternating languages within a short utterance. The order of the input towards Speaker B is not reciprocated, however. Instead, Speaker B gives his output in English and then isiZulu. In Speaker B’s utterance, the languages are intermeshed in the same unit of meaning. The conversation shows that kasitaal speakers have a huge repertoire of language use that breaks boundaries in ways render them versatile speakers and listeners.

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Social sensitivity In contrast to conversations between two multilingual speakers who share the same linguistic repertoires, the data revealed that multilingual speakers are sensitive to the conversation spaces they occupy. Extract 2 is a prototypical example: Extract 2: C: How about you teach me isiZulu and I help you guys with English? D: Deal baba yo. What do you say Siboniso? Le auti ingasinceda mfana, this guy can help us.

This is a conversation between two Kasi-taal speakers and English native speaker at a university campus. The native speaker (Speaker C) offers to teach the kasi-taal students English in return for teaching him isiZulu. Speaker C uses a monolingual utterance since English is the only languages he knows. In response to C, Speaker D starts his talk in English, meshed with isiZulu, baba yo. This speaker agrees to C’s proposal in English, but the feeling of gratitude is expressed in an isiZulu phrase for endearment to a male figure, baba, which literally means “father” as stated above. This gratitude is interrupted in the following stream of thought where the speaker asks his friend, Siboniso, if they both agree to be helped and return the help for the English native speaker. This part of information flow is mediated through English to accommodate the native speaker. The next meaning unit is expressed in isiZulu, le auti ingasinceda mfana, which is subsequently repeated in English, “this guy can help us”. Speaker D is clearly very sensitive to other speakers around him, directing his talk to one speaker, but ensuring that the by-standing hearer is part of the conversations. From the point of view of the speaker, we can see that he pulls linguistic resources available to him to think and accommodate complex linguistic situations around him. This tallies with general observations elsewhere that multilingual speakers are complex users of language and that they are socially sensitive to others (see Canagarajah, 2011; Wei, 2011). Their heightened sensitivity reveals that multilinguals are capable of becoming monolinguals and take up different identities in a singular or multilayered fashion if and when the situation requires them to behave in either way.

Transcultural communities The data has shown that Kasi-taal speakers do not only use vocabulary from local contexts, they also draw from transnational cultural expressions they identify with. The following extract shows this trend:

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Extract 3 E: Ey dwang, you see uyaphapha F: You can’t say that about my sister nigger.

First, Speaker E uses a slang, dwang, which refers to a guy. In the same utterance, he brings in English and isiZulu in the same stream of thought, “you see uyaphapha” (you see, you are too inquisitive). Speaker E, on the other hand, swears at him using the word, nigger, which is used derogatively to refer to African Americans and often re-appropriated by this group of speakers to refer to a friend in a pledge of solidarity against discrimination. This imported usage shows that kasitaal speakers often have imagined communities due to international exposure to different cultures and behaviours. While they localized their linguistic repertoires, they also develop transcultural repertoires that cut across national boundaries as part of their expanded ways of becoming in the 21st century. It is in this context that Blommaert’s (2010) concept of critical sociolinguistics of globalization becomes even more relevant. In this case, kasi-taal speakers are not only preoccupied with local ways of identifying, but they also assume transcultural identities that are mediated through globalization.

Multi-greetings The data revealed numerous ways of passing on greetings in the townships. The following extract reveals such greeting complexities: Extract 4 G: Sho sho mfana (greetings) H: Hey G: Zthini daso (how are you?) H: Am at the top of the mountain, youself G: Nami ngigrand H: Any plans for the weekend? G: You know with me abantwana H: I thought as much, some people G: Hawu uthini manje? H: Hey did you find . . . G: Who are some people H: Wow is that . . . G: Don’t play smart here. Just answer the question. H: Question . . . .what question? G: Nar sharp

Greetings and goodbyes have taken blended language forms among the kasi-taal speakers in this dialogue. Sho, a shortened version of English, “Sure”, is used

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informally to start a conversation such as in greeting someone. Speaker G says, “sho sho Mfana”, using the word, “mfana” for boy, an endearment for a male young person as, for example, used in the name of the national soccer team: Bafanabafana. Speaker H responds in English while Speaker G continues to speak in kasi-taal, Zthini daso. This utterance shows a blend of isiZulu, Zthini for “how are things?” and a shortened Afrikaans version, daso for daar so, which means there. What is worth noting is that Speaker H is exclusively speaking in English while Speaker G sticks to Nguni language repertoires available at his disposal. At the end of the conversation, Speaker G is unhappy with H and uses “sharp”, which is commonly used to mean either goodbye, I don’t care, ok, or I am fine. What is striking about these usages is that both “sharp” and “sure” have evolved semantically from standard English meanings (sharp as in ‘a sharp knife’ and sure as in ‘certain’) to localized nuances of the ekasi speakers as seen in this dialogue. The overall conversation style for building social rapport in this dialogue typifies translanguaging practices where input is received in one language and output is given out in a different language. Here, we see exchange of input and output languages between the speakers who shared common linguistic repertoires, which are multilayered. Again here, multilinguals use flexible, sensitive and complex discourses to fit their social needs.

Merged Sotho language varieties One of the distinguishing characteristics of the dialogues was the mixed use of languages in the Sotho cluster: Setswana, Sepedi, Sesotho as in the following extract: Extract 5 I: Eh matjita, i really have to tell you guys iets J: He banna bolela monna o ska tlo te ketsa ngwanyana (Oh my, talk, don’t behave like a girl) I: Hahaha this guy is on some gay tip hey J: hahaha, niks matjita, no homo (US Cartoon). Ere. < laughing> nothing guys, I am not a gay. I: Ok, tell us then J: I’ve got this thing for this girl i met at school. Her name is katy I: Ahh o sa re bjalo jo, byanong. O tlo mo shela neng? (Don’t say this now. When are you going to ask her out?) J: I actually don’t know hey I: No dude, o ra bjanong? (what do you mean now?) J: She doesn’t know. What she knows ke gore we are friends and that’s that. (is that)

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First, this extract shows another typical translanguaging practice where languages of input and output are exchanged. In this case, there is an extensive use of Afrikaans vocabulary like niks (nothing), iets (something) shared between speakers I and J. Secondly, a mixed version of three Sotho languages (Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana) is used by both speakers in all instances where they give or receive input in English. The sentence, “He banna bolela monna o ska tlo te ketsa ngwanyana” shows that the speaker has interwoven three languages in one utterance. He starts with Sesotho “He”, followed by “banna” (men) that is commonly shared among the three languages; “bolela” (speak) is Sepedi; “o ska tlo te” is a hybrid form; “ketsa” is Setswana; and “ngwanyana” is both Setswana and Sesotho. A more dense mixture is found in Speaker I: “Ahh o sa re bjalo jo, byanong. O tlo mo shela neng?” where it is hard to tease parts of the sentence into any of the languages, partly because these languages are mutually intelligible and partly because of the hybrid mix in which this speaker has used them. O ra bjanong is found in both Setswana and Sesotho, slightly deviating from Sepedi version of “O ra bjang?” As observed above, the speakers are still capable of separating one language form from another as and when it is communicatively meaningful for them to do so. In the last utterance, Speaker J selects a typical Sepedi form, “ke gore” instead of Setswana/Sesotho version of “ke hore”, which might imply that Speaker J’s heritage language is Sepedi or the “g” sound was preferred for emphasis. While it is outside of the scope of this paper to track heritage languages of the kasi-taal speakers, this extract reveals that there is a large repertoire of Sotho languages that are mutually intelligible (see Makalela, 2009; Nhlapho, 1944). In terms of everyday dialogues, speakers of kasi-taal concomitantly exploit these intelligibility patterns to transcend boundaries in the Sotho cluster.

The I-language of Sotho and Nguni varieties Apart from the blended use of Sotho languages as seen in Extract 5 above, the participants’ discourse patterns revealed a further layer of complexity, which suggests an internal organization rule that feeds into translanguaged forms. This was observed even in instances where Sotho and Nguni languages were mixed and used interchangeably. Extract 6 below is revealing: Extract 6: K: Hey bro awungimele da. (Wait for me there.) L: Eish ntwana re ka bloma kae? ( . . . .my friend where should we sit) K: A si blome ecafeteria after lelecture, ngifuna nje ukugawula (Let’s sit at the cafeteria after the lecture; I would like to eat)

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L: Ei bro, did you get what the brother was talking about? Iyo, the die man o a bora tjo (. . . is man is boring . . .) K: Tjo le muntu u ya confusa, one minute o ringa ngabo Bandura, the next u ringa ngaboZuma (. . . this person is confusing; one minute he speaks about Bandura and the next one he speaks about Zuma) L: Ya parliament le ditheorist di mixana kae? (Where do the parliament and theorist mix?) K: Eintlike die maan othole le degree yakhe waar? It must be from e pick’e pay or shoprite (Actually, where did this man get his degree?) L: O utlwile voice ya hae nkare ke Spanish guitar, iyo ka hopola Tony Brixton a shapa guitar. (You heard his voice is like a Spanish guitar . . . .I thought about Tony Brixton playing a guitar) K: It’s like okhanywe ngamarula (It’s like he’s strangled by a morula fruit) L: Eish nayi lentwana yemlungu iyankinya, ithanda uku answer during ama lecture and asking ama question a dumm i sho off yona tjo (. . . and this white chick likes to answer the lecturers and asking stupid questions. She’s showing off)

This extract shows its kasi-blend with the use of Afrikaans forms, da for daars so (there), eintlik for actually, waar for where and die man for the man, which are shared between speakers in this dialogue. Two particular words that are distinctly kasi-taal are “bloema” and “ukugaula”. The former has Afrikaans root, “bloem” for a flower, but has been affixed with a Sotho/Nguni verb marker /- a/, to convert it into a verb. In this context of kasi-taal, this has come to mean sitting comfortably in places such as home or where one lives. Here, we see association of flowers with place of sitting, which maps social situations where there is a connection between flowers and comfortable houses or place of sitting. This usage shows complexities of both semantic shifts and derivational morphology procedure where one part of speech is changed to another. The same derivational use of words across languages is discerned also from the word “ukugaula” which is derived from the English noun, “gaol”. In this example, it has taken Nguni infinite pre-verbal affix, /uku-/ to turn it into a non-finite verb, meaning “to eat”. When this happens between languages, one sees the creative possibilities of kasi-taal users of the hybrid form as rulegoverned. I refer to this phenomenon of rule-crossing between languages as internal translanguaging. The extract reveals more extensive affixation from Nguni languages with /ama-/, e-/ as in “ecafeteria” and /le-/ as in “lelecture” and from Sotho languages/di-/ as in ditheorist, which is Noun Class Prefix 4 common to all these languages. This shows that an initial phase of lexical borrowing where African languages take underlying forms to shape new words into their lexical pool. Through translanguaging within Nguni languages and Sotho languages, respectively, this borrowing from outside of African languages harmonizes vocabulary development. For example, ecafeteria becomes a lexical item that is indexical to all

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Nguni languages: isiXhosa, isiZulu, isiNdebele, and Siswati. Similarly, ditheorist is not distinguishable between traditional Sotho language boundaries: Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana. It is evident from this example that Kasi-taal, through its extensive lexical borrowing, has invariably broken the traditional boundaries between these languages. What follows logically from here is that as more words are borrowed into one’s kasi repertoire, they are lexicalized as Nguni or Sotho. In this regard, internal translanguaging rule between languages in the same cluster makes their mutual inter-comprehensibility very apparent. In a nutshell, we see mutual inter-comprehensibility through exchange of vocabulary items between the languages (external translanguaging) and through retention of the common morphological forms on newly borrowed words (internal translanguaging). The latter is further demonstrated by words such as confu-sa from confuse and mix-ana from mix. Overall, kasi-taal recognizes no boundaries between and within languages and speaker mobility from Nguni to Sotho versions and vice-versa seem a natural way to communicate for the participants in this extract.

7.9 Leaking boundaries This discussions above explain how kasi-taal speakers perform their multilingual practices in the townships around Johannesburg. The main result from self-recorded dialogues is that communication among these speakers is spatiotemporally complex and that it embodies transcultural and linguistic movements of people who co-habited the kasi (location) space. Their linguistic moves cut across traditional linguistic boundaries in ways that reflect their multiple identities and hybrid habitus. The first instance of translanguaging practices was revealed through the speakers’ ability to mesh the codes within streams of single thought units. For example, there were opportunities to use more than 3 languages in one utterance. This linguistic flexibility suggests that indeed multilingual speakers in ekasi spaces described have an extended linguistic repertoire from which they pool a range of language forms to express meanings. Also, their communicative focus is on meaning expressions as native speakers of a particular language would do, rather than on codes they use. Because this process of relating meaning in enmeshed codes has been automatized, one is able to affirm a common understanding in translanguaging studies that the languages used are not differentiated, but rather form an amorphous continuum in which speakers soft assemble (Garcia, 2009, 2019) and use available discursive resources as and when the social environment dictates. In other words, from the point of view of

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the speakers, multilinguals do not necessarily switch from one code to the next as studies on code-switching tend to suggest (e.g., Gumpertz, 1982). The very notion of many codes among multilinguals is challenged. Second, the study has shown that blended ways of using languages become creative in establishing rapport through greeting forms. Instead of using traditional greeting forms that characterize specific language group, the speakers prefer more neutral forms that have historical roots in English or Afrikaans. We have seen that ‘sho’ and ‘da’ have become common kasi-taal distinguishing properties, which have no ethnic lineage to any of the African languages. Instead of using complete English words, the speakers creatively use semantic shifts as in ‘sure’ for certainty to a contracted form that has expanded in meaning to include ‘hello’ or ‘how are you?’ The study has shown that these greeting usages make it harder to identify someone as speaking a particular African language. In doing so, the speakers resisted mother tongue labels of their heritage languages. Here, this practice shows that translanguaging speakers make decisions to decide who they want to become by choosing greeting forms that are not indexical to traditional language boundaries. Although the kasi-taal speakers are fully enmeshed in their environment where they bridge linguistic gaps, the study has shown that they are constantly involved in transcultural imagination of the globalized world. The word, nigger, used in complex ways to refer to African Americans, has found its way in the streets of Soweto, which may reflect transcultural identifying with African Americans. While it has no history in Soweto, it appeared that transcultural imagination takes precedence due to exposure to popular culture from the US. It should be stressed, therefore, that globalization and fast exchange of information in the 21st century languaging expressions are no longer attached to particular space and time. This is a typical example of linguistic mobility that indexical to permeability of boundaries between languages and cultures (Blommaert, 2010; Blackledge and Creese, 2017; Makoni, 2003). Another important finding in the study is with regard to experiential harmonization of discretely defined Sotho languages. Mixed neigbourhoods of traditional users of three Sotho languages in the ekasis have brought these languages so close that the kasi-taal speakers use them interchangeably when they language between one another. The study has shown translanguaging between speakers of mutually intelligible languages becomes a natural process where they become indistinguishable in everyday use. While translanguaging literature often refers to mixture of non-cognate languages, here we saw an opportunity for extending Sotho linguistic repertoires. In previous studies, Sotho languages were classified as mutually intelligible to the extent that their orthographies can be harmonized or restandardized into a common

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form (Alexander, 1989; Makalela, 2009; Prah, 1998). The kasi-taal languaging experience has revealed practical opportunities for harmonized use in hybrid communities such as the kasi-taal speakers. The idea of indistinguishable forms of traditional boundaries in African languages was revealed further through lexicalization process when kasi-taal borrows words from African languages, English and Afrikaans. Here, the study revealed that there are internal rule-governing lexical formations when all these languages come into contact in the townships. I have shown that there is a semantic shift that re-appropriates words in new creative ways as the speakers continuously shape their identities in examples such as bloma (to sit comfortably, homely), which is associated with flower gardens around homes. I have also illustrated morphological rules where English root words follow regular derivational processes in which their original parts of speech are changed through the African languages affixation system. While this is a normal process of lexical borrowing between non-cognate languages, what perhaps is salient is the similarity of the morphological conjugations in clustered African languages. This renders the newly borrowed lexeme to become neutral for traditional speakers of 3–4 African languages. For example, “lelecture” would be generic to all Nguni languages while “ditheorists” is generic to Sotho languages. I referred to this phenomenon as internal translanguaging, which takes advantage of similarities in the substrate systems of mutually intelligible African languages languages. The kasi-taal usage predicts future harmonization possibilities that transcend linguistic boundaries of closely related languages.

7.10 Conclusion In this chapter I have showed that South Africa, like many parts of the world, has experienced language in motion situation that is caused by translocal and transnational movements of its citizens. This changing linguistic landscape shows that the townships around Johannesburg practice multilingualism in fluid, mobile and flexible ways that transcend traditional Bantu language boundaries. It is in this context that labels such as mother tongue to individuals from these areas are increasingly irrelevant in favour of a hybrid form, kasi-taal, which involves a confluence of Afrikaans, English, Nguni and Sotho named languages. From a translanguaging perspective, the speakers’ linguistic repertoires have expanded to give them flexibility to soft-assemble and make choices in their everyday encounters such as when they are in monolingual situations. This langauging practice goes far beyond what has traditionally been referred to as code-switching, which often focuses on separate language codes and insinuates second language

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acquisition views as interference within and between sentence structures. What we see, instead, is the way in which multilingual speakers tend to become socially versatile in actively making choices about who they want to become in fluid language context situations. In Garcia’s (2011) terms, multilingual express their identifies through languaging. At face value, the data presented in the case study also suggest that kasitaal is a rule-governed system that follows regular semantic and morphological processes of contact language situations. In this case, morphological processes of affixation revealed internal languaging system that converges kasi-taal usage across a wider spectrum of users of different named languages, which already share common grammatical rules. Importantly, however, kasi-taal needs to be interpreted from meaning making process of multilingual users as a repertoire rather than distinct languages sitting parallel to each other. While, at the surface, this phenomenon reflects how kasi-taal speakers see themselves as a new generation of speakers who cannot be tied to a single linguistic and cultural code, it is worth noting that transcultural and linguistic mobility of the people in the 21 Century provide new opportunities to interpret languages from the speakers points of view: what they do with the named languages rather that what the morpho-syntactic structures look like. Future language policies and planning activities may have to grapple with this fuzzy way of communicating and its resultant domestication of the strangeness. In similar ways, future language policy and planning activities may need to begin taking account of these new forms of languaging, which are language user driven rather than orthodox views of languages as static and separable entities.

Chapter 8 Sankofa, decolonization and shifting multilingual lenses “People without history and culture become mimics who have placed their memories in a psychic tomb” Ngugi wa Thiongo

8.1 Introduction South Africa, like many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, has not leveraged on its wealth of cultural history to define its linguistic landscape, ways of being, knowing and acting. Despite the pretence of 11 official languages with an official status, its linguistic ideology reflects monolingual and epistemic biases that are a carryover from colonization and Apartheid periods. Many applied linguists scholars have challenged colonial imposition of foreign languages and norms in education and other domains of societies and denial of students’ personhood and cultural identities (e.g., Mckinney, 2016; Rosa and Flores, 2017). For this group of resistance scholars, marginalization of African languages undergird epistemic injustice under what is termed epistimicide (Gatsheni-Ndlovu, 2013, 2015; 2017) and a burial of their identities in a psychic tomb (Wa Thiong’o, 1992). The death of one’s identity, in this instance, and limits access to knowledge in education and questions the relevance of colonial languages in the reconstruction and development projects. The basic question on how African nations can decolonize both cultural and linguistic imperialism and challenge neoliberal narratives in the post-colonial era has not been adequately addressed. In this chapter, I review pertinent issues on the African philosophy of historical consciousness and the cultural competence of ubuntu and discuss how these can be leveraged to decolonize linguistic practices towards more fluid and versatile systems that align with the African ways of being, doing and knowing.

8.2 Temporal complexity: Looking back to fetch Many scholars have investigated ways of decolonizing African countries from the linguistic, cultural and epistemological biases that have historically disadvantaged the African people (e.g., Gatsheni-Ndlovu, 2017; Makalela, 2018b). One of the indigenous ways of knowing rests with the value of historical consciousness and https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614515067-008

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the need to constantly refer back while stretching forward for sustainable and grounded development. To this end, the Akan metaphor, which is mainly dominant in West Africa accords the power of looking back in order to move forward with reinforced determination. A mythical bird called Sankofa (Figure 1) is instructive about temporal fluidity where the past and the present are a confluent continuum, living in same cosmological order without rigid boundaries (Makalela, 2018b).

Figure 2: Sankofa. (Source: Makalela 2016)

This mythical bird resembles strategic engagement with simultaneous back and forward movements. Literally speaking, the head of Sankofa points backward (i.e., into the past) while the feet are stretching forward (into the moment and future) so that the present, past and future become a continuum temporal whole. I have written separately (author 2005) about how this logic of time is reflected in the languages spoken where temporal difference is not discrete or bounded. What we glean from this mythical bird is a philosophy of temporal complexity where the boundaries of time are constantly disrupted while new temporal zones are recreated at the same time. If anything, the Sankofa does not value linearity, sequencing and hierarchy may be the case in the foundations of Greco-Latin cultural constructs.

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8.3 Ubuntu and pre-colonial African multilingualism Using Sankofa as a heuristic of knowing, making sense and cultural identity, it is applied here to understand the interfaces between pre-colonial and postcolonial language and cultural landscapes. First, there is evidence that pre-colonial Africa had civilization centres. Research has documented successful trade between forest, southern lakes and the Congo kingdoms (e.g., Carruthers, 2006). The Southern African kingdom of Mapungubwe under Emperor Monomotapa is an example of a civilization that was spread to other parts of the world. Mapungubwe, which borders South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe, emerged as a result of confluence of the rivers of Sashe and Limpopo and eventually came to be known as the Limpopo Valley as in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Limpopo Valley. (Source: Makalela 2016)

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Figure 4: Mapungubwe. (Source: Makalela 2018a)

In particular, archaeologists brought substantial evidence of successful trade between the city of Mapungubwe,1 Egypt, India and China, among others (see Foucher, 1937 for a full appraisal). Relevant to this chapter is that more than one language was used to communicate complex ideas that resulted in one of the civilization centres that paralleled the European medieval period, which was troubled with instability due to foreign invasions (e.g., Makalela, 2018b; Ricento, 2000). As shown in Figure 4 below, these languages included complex multilingual encounters where variants of Shona or Kalanga, Sotho, Khoe-San and Nguni languages were spread all over the kingdom (Makalela, 2015). As reported in Makalela (2018b), there is evidence from ceramic pots and indigenous games such as morabaraba,2 which reveal a multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual community (e.g., Carruthers, 2006).

1 Mapungubwe is a historical name of the Limpopo Valley- an area that stretches the surroundings of Limpopo and Sashe rivers in what is today the border of Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa. 2 Morabaraba is an indigenous African board game, played originally on engraved stones. It is shared across a wider spectrum of the speakers of indigenous African languages.

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Figure 5: A multilingual city- Early Shona, Kalanga, Sotho, Ngoni, Khoi. (Source: Makalela, 2018b)

Associatively, the people of Mapungubwe practised Ubuntu- their humanist approach to life where it was believed that human beings come from the reed and that they belong together (Khoza, 2013). In their cultural ethos, they believed in the collective philosophy and as a result, Ubuntu became a way of life as found in today’s versions of umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a version for the Nguni languages) or motho ke motho ka batho (version for the Sotho languages), which translate into ‘ you are because we are or I am because you are’. As stated in earlier the notion of ubuntu does not easily fit explanations in Western language and thought. Tomaselli (2018) warns against the use of concepts such as ubuntu as essentialized and mythologized, yet admits to its existence as a unique African concept that promotes the communitarian experience of human connectedness. One would add that that its ontology goes beyond human connectedness to include the whole ecosystem (Hauck et.al, 2018) in which the human is found (everything connected to everything). Without essentializing its interpretations, it is useful to consider ubuntu and its pan-African relevance as somewhat distinct from Western versions of altruism and humanness. While sharing a lot in common with the Latin American version of Buen Vivir, the high level of fluidity and infinite relations of dependency found in ubuntu value system allows us to define cultural and linguistic identities from a highly versatile and yet interconnected vantage point. It is for this reason that ubuntu paradox offers an ideological departure and reinterpretations of multilingualism from non-Western perspectives. When one says, for example, “O na le botho” meaning you have ubuntu, this

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encapsulates generosity, hospitability, friendliness, care and compassion to, nonhumans and inanimate objects in the surrounding. This communal expression of African humanism expressed in ubuntu (i.e., I am because you are) sits at odds with the perceived individualism of the West represented by the phrase: “I think, therefore I am” (Brock-Utne and Lwaitama, 2010). It is useful here to reiterate that the “I” x “We” logic permeates the philosophical orientation and worldviews of most of speakers of Bantu named languages in Sub-Saharan Africa with versions of this saying available in almost all the named languages. Because of this belief in interdependence, the Mapungubwe inhabitants achieved one of the greatest civilization centers in the region. Taken together, this description of Mapungubwe attest that indigenous people with Bantu language background had ways of being and knowing that showed infinite relations of dependency. The speakers of these languages are believed to carry this value system of interconnectedness. For example, visiting or finding another human being was highly valued- hence expansion of family system as seen in expressions such as ‘younger mother’ or ‘elder father’, ‘stranger come to my home so that we grow’ and ‘it takes a village to bring up a child’ (see Ifi Amadiume, 1987). Unlike the fear of the foreigner, which characterized the European medieval period and the resultant nation statism, South African people were endowed with ubuntu, which encouraged cohabitation and interdependence between people of different tribes and their languages. When framed in this light, it was thus possible for Emperor Monomotapa to oversee a large space of tribes that today include five Southern African countries (Cox 1992). To understand multilingualism in pre-colonial South Africa, our Sankofa approach highlights a plural sense of common loyalties and solidarity among a people who shared culture and language varieties that were mutually intercomprehensible.

8.4 Colonization and the scramble for Africa The European Enlightenment period ushered in monolingual orientation in the world with the vision of the world as an isomorphy of territorised languages that are bounded and sealed in each sovereign states. Due to the need to protect the sovereign states against the invading foreigners, the nation statism ideology of one-ness emerged to bring about a rebirth of the continent. As shown previously, the one nation one language ideology led to linguistic research producing results suggesting that the use of more than one language creates mental confusion and national identity crisis (Makalela, 2017; Ricento, 2000)

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While displacement and slavery of the African people started many years ago, colonization started in 1848 and was formalized at the Berlin Convention of 1884. Thiong’o reports as follows: The contention started a hundred years ago when the capitalist power of Europe sat in Berlin and carved an entire continent with multiplicity of people, cultures and languages into different colonies (p.110)

In what Thiong’o refers to as the ‘sword’ and ‘bullet’, England, France, Italy, Germany, Portugal and Spain divided Africa into colonial states where the languages of the colonized countries were subverted in order to provide a pathway for linguistic and cultural domination from the colonial countries. As observed earlier, a key imperative for colonization was to control the thoughts and identity positions of the local people through linguistic regimentation (Davidson, 1992). With the aim to turn the local people into subjects of the empires, there were commissions that were created to promote a pyramid of linguistic imperialism and control of how the local people used languages. One of these known commissions is the Phelps-Stokes Commission of the 1920s (Makalela, 2018b; King, 2019). Its recommendations affect current language policies as below: – The tribal language should be used in the lower elementary standards or grades. – A lingua franca of African origin should be introduced in the middle classes of the school if the area is occupied by large Native groups speaking diverse languages. – The language of the European nation in control should be taught in the upper standards. The recommendation of the Phelps Commission was sought to explain and clarify a linguistic programme that was put in place almost a century earlier. What is very striking in this commission report is the packaging of language literacies in a sequence and hierarchy. Separation of languages here reflect dominant monolingual view of separate development. The outcome of the commission, as also reported in Makalela (2017), affirmed an Africa-wide immersion programme that has four categories: a. Delayed immersion found in former English and Belgian colonies b. Total assimilation in former French, Portuguese and Spanish colonies c. Double assimilation in Tanzania, Eritrea d. Retention of local languages in primary schools (Somalia, Ethiopia, Comoros, Madagascar, Tanzania).

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For South Africa, delayed immersion ideology founded under subtractive bilingualism for schooling became a colonial practice that is carried out to date. The majority of children with African language backgrounds learn through the medium of English and then make transition to learning through the medium of English in Grade 4 till their university studies. Taken together, this period of colonization brought about a rigid, linear and hierarchical language practice where only one language is used for learning and teaching at any given time.

8.5 Monolingual and epistemological biases As discussed in Chapter 2, the languages struggle in South Africa led to use of exogenous languages to the detriment of the local languages. Key to this sociolinguistic reality is that monolingual lenses were ‘planted’ within the colonized territories where diverse languages were pitied against each for recognition as either national or official languages of the country. Most notably, because a language has a dual function as a means of communication and carrier of culture, marginalization of African languages into the periphery also became a displacement of local culture, ways of being, knowing and being. To decolonize in this instance means first to recentre African languages, their culture and epistemic beliefs that are aligned with the local ways of meaning making.

8.6 Shifting lenses: Developing culture-based alternative theories One of the ways to upset monolingual bias and allow multiple voices to come into contact is to look back at socio-linguistic background of the African people prior to colonialism. The history of Mapungubwe, as described earlier, and its linguistic repertoire become a cardinal point for South Africa to reclaim African linguistic and cultural competence. I have elsewhere (author) shown that the African value system of Ubuntu is a heuristic for African multilingualism where the use of more than one language through fluid and porous interaction is a norm that can be cultivated strategically in education, among other domains, where one language is incomplete without the other. One of these multilingual practices is translanguaging- a discourse where linguistic input and output are alternated in different languages (Creese and Blackledge, 2010a; Garcia, 2009, 2011; Garcia and Li Wei, 2014). In African situations, the notion of alternation is complex in that it involves infinite relations of dependency while at the same time valorising singular existence as in the “I” and “We” of ubuntu. My colleague and I have shown that there

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is a complex co-existence of vertical and horizontal translanguaging discourse practices in classrooms (Nkadimeng and Makalela, 2015). Viewing multilingualism from this experience of complex translanguaging provides opportunities for epistemological shift from what languages look like to what speakers do with languages. Application of translanguaging approach in the context of Ubuntu provides policy makers with measures to question the validity of language boundaries and review current regimes of languages from the point of view of meaning making. That is, when speakers are engaged in meaning making they translanguage and disrupt the rigid boundaries of the socially named languages. Within the logic of Ubuntu translanguaging, notions such as first language, mother tongue and second or additional language need to be reviewed as these do not account for complex translingual discourse practices in many African and global South contexts where children can speak up to six named languages before they turn 6 years of age. In this instance, these children do not have a mother tongue or home languages, but have a repertoire from which they strategically select features they would need to use according to the context. Because additive and subtractive bilingual programmes suggest a sequential view of language acquisition (i.e., one language at a time) and they tend to favour monoglossic curriculum they remain are not relevant to the socio-cultural reality of ubuntu as discussed. Put differently, multilingualism from the translanguaging point of view does not place emphasis on enumeration of languages; it is focused on meaning making process where there is constant disruption of boundaries and simultaneous recreation of new ones.

8.7 Conclusion In this chapter, I demonstrated that multilingualism in South Africa is conceived from the European lens of enumerating languages as separate entities under the aegis of one-ness ideology. The 11 official language policy are the result of a colonial history that displaced ways of knowing, being and acting, which are plural and aligned with the value system of ubuntu. The hierarchy of languages as seen in policy do not fit in well with the cultural competence of speakers of African languages. There is therefore a need to place cultures and world views of speakers of African languages to rehabilitate current conceptions of languages in the Constitution.

Chapter 9 Ubuntu translanguaging: Implications for language policy and education Subject to any law dealing with language in education and the constitutional rights of the learners, in determining the language policy of the school, the governing body must stipulate how the school will promote multilingualism through using more than one language of learning and teaching, and/or applying special immersion or language maintenance programmes. (Republic of South Africa, 1997, p.8)

9.1 Introduction South Africa has developed one of the broad ranging language in education policy in the world in order to promote multilingualism (RSA, 1997). Using more than one language of learning and teaching and opening up to immersion and maintenance language programmes stand out in this policy proscription. Despite what seems like a grandiose language in education policy for transformation of classroom spaces that were historically reserved for English and Afrikaans, the practice on the ground show a linear, sequential and one language domination in a subtractive manner that mirrors colonial languagein-education practices. The majority of the of African languages do not have access to education in the languages they understand from primary school to university. This chapter provides an overview of the shortcomings of the policy and the opportunities it offers for locally-informed multilingual education and literacies in the basic and tertiary education sectors.

9.2 Reflecting on constitutional provisions The language-in education policy stated above is informed by the South African Constitution commitment to 11 official languages status: Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, isiZulu, SiSwati, isiXhosa, isiNdebele, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, English and Afrikaans (RSA, 1996). In addition, the Bill of Rights made a provision for every child to be taught in languages of their choice: Every child has the right to receive education in the official language of their choice in public educational institutions where that education is reasonably practicable. (Republic of South Africa, 1996, 29 (2))

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The School governing bodies were given powers to determine school-based language policies where, among other considerations, a sufficient number of learners should be available for a language to be granted status of medium of instruction in public schools. Language-in-Education Policy devolved the powers to these bodies as follows: . . . the governing body must stipulate how the school will promote multilingualism through using more than one language of learning and teaching, and/or applying special immersion or language maintenance programmes. (Department of Education, 1997, p.8)

I have observed elsewhere that is provision is interpreted from a monolingual perspective where subtractive bilingual tendencies become the norm (author 2017). In most primary schools, a home language is used for learning and teaching in the first three years of schooling and then English becomes the language of learning and teaching from Grade 4. A few number of schools opted for a “straight-for-English” policy where English is introduced as the language of learning from Grade 1. In this connection, South Africa has de facto adopted two colonial styles that have been used on the continent for centuries: delayed immersion and total assimilation. In effect, the separation of languages as during the Apartheid period remain the status quo as there are limited curriculum provisions where multilingual literacies or the learners’ full linguistic repertoires are employed simultaneously as resources for identity affirmation and meaning making. When framed in this light, the linguistic apartheid of the past negates the spirit of the Constitution and the intentions of the language in education policy and places the South African schooling systems as neo-colonial and disempowering for the majority of the learners whose languages are systematically excluded.

9.3 Neo-apartheid practices and unequal access to literacy As mentioned above, a cursory review of the language of learning and teaching in South Africa reflects the domination of Afrikaans and English, which by extension put speakers of these languages at an educational advantage over Black children whose languages are not used beyond Grade 3 as per the Phelp Commision recommendation reported in the previous chapter. In addition, the national examination at grade 12 is still exclusively conducted in Afrikaans and English. Neville Alexander observed this pattern of literacy inequality and poignantly reflect as follows:

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It is an amazing fact that South Africa, in spite of its modernist pretensions, is one of the few countries worldwide where at least primary school children are not taught through the medium of the mother tongue or a language of immediate community . . . It is an equally amazing fact that within the South African context the only children who receive mother tongue medium education virtually from cradle to the tertiary level are the minority English and Afrikaans-speaking children of the country. Children born to parents whose home language is one or other African language; i.e., the vast majority of our children, are doomed to be taught through a medium of the second language (mostly English) from the third or fourth year of school, mostly by teachers for whom this medium is at best a second language but often only a third language. (Alexander, 2001, p.16–17)

Alexander is unequivocal that the maintenance of Afrikaans and English medium education system repeats many years of linguistic discrimination, not only from the inception of Apartheid in 1948 but also from the onset of colonial contact where local languages were excluded and derogatorily castigated as the ‘chuckling of the turkeys’. (Alexander, 1989). This maintenance is also seen at tertiary institutions where either English monolingualism or Afrikaans-English bilingualism is the norm while the majority of the students in these institutions have no opportunity to learn in any of the African languages. In this connection, it is safe to claim that the grand challenge for South Africa is the domination of monolingual ideologies, which to date limit literacy access to the majority of students. There is therefore a need to re-orientate multilingualism that offers alternative pathway to educating multilingual learners and students.

9.4 Ubuntu translanguaging model A translanguaging model based on Ubuntu principles, referred to here as Ubuntu translanguaging, shifts the gaze from language divisions to complex repertoires that are fluid in everyday meaning making interactions. More importantly, it reflects on a dialectic disruption of linguistic boundaries and simultaneous recreation of new ones as represented in Figure 6. The Ubuntu translanguaging (UT) model as above denotes a fluid and porous relationship where in the first instance languages operates within the humanity logic of the I x We, which is translated from the African value system of Ubuntu with its basic tenet: I am because you are; you are because I am. The binding of “I” with “We” through a multiplication sign suggests an existential and complex relationship between these entities that look separate, yet tied together by a sense of co-existence. Referring to this complex and dynamic sense of belonging, Severo and Makoni’s (2019) analysis of ubuntu suggest that the sense of collective belonging deconstructs the rational and abstract ideology of language as a logic system. Interpretation of languages within the

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Vertical flow

incompletion • Continuation

• Discontinuation Horizontal flow Interdepencce

• "I x We" Figure 6: Ubuntu translanguaging (source: Makalela 2016).

ubuntu logic involves the collective relationship between language and humans as well as non-humans; ie., the totality of the ecosystem (Severo and Makoni, 2019). This ontological matrix of self and others is at the root of Ubuntu where forces of humaneness bind an infinite bond of collectivity (Khoza, 1013; Makalela, 2015). In this connection, languages are a re-presentation of this human cultural logic of being together as opposed to being separated entities that are capable of being placed in sealed boxes (Makalela, 2015). That is, languages are products of a sense of community and belonging. Due to their endowment with Ubuntu, language encounters in multilingual communities show a constant process of disruption and eruption – dialectic processes that occur simultaneously. As they do this, they overlap into one another to the extent that boundaries between them become blurred and irrelevant when the users are engaged in meaning making processes. The next point illustrated in this model is the notion of incompletion. Drawn from the Ubuntu logic, it denotes the realization that no language is complete without the other in complex multilingual encounters. As shown with the “I × We”, both the “I’ness” and “We’ness” do not form a coherent whole in their identity matrix. The second principle of incompletion comes from the experience of treating visitors. Expressions of this are found in idiomatic phrases such as ‘moeng etla ka geso re je ka wena’ for visitor please come to my place so that I am complete. As in this human need for companionship, feeling of incompletion and the genetic make-up, languages that were acquired simultaneously would always create this space of incompletion in meaning making. It is the desire to be complete that linguistic repertoires for meaning making come closer to one another in multilingual communication. The corollary is that restriction to and imposition of learning and teaching in one language is, to multilingual

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speakers, both an epistemic and ontological injustice that erodes their ways of knowing, making sense and being. The third aspect of Ubuntu translanguaging is interdependence, which follows naturally from incompletion. Interdependence refers to co-existence of two or more language entities in the process of meaning making. Because these languages were acquired at the same time, the world view and self-concept of the speakers were formed from this plural nexus of one language depending on another for full expression in sense making: the world around one and the self. The consistent state of being incomplete becomes a pre-requisite for completing the cycle of meaning making. This means that multilingual speakers have to use repertoires from different varieties to make sense of the world and have deeper understanding of realities around them. Both aspects of incompletion and interdependence relate to the mobile status of the 21st century features and the resultant view of languages as in a constant state of transition. The languages of the world have responded to this new sociolinguistic reality of interdependent multilingualism as opposed to monolingual multilingualism described earlier. Interdependence is, therefore, the outcome of an infinite relations of dependency as opposed to independence. The fourth tenet of UT shows the complexity of information flow where both horizontal and vertical mobility of information in communicative events takes place simultaneously. The plus-minus signs denote that this flow has a push-pull with backward and forward movements that render the terminal end of information flow unpredictable, uncertain and indefinite. Whereas it is common worldwide for interlocutors to hear input in one language and give out a response (output) in a different language, many African sociolinguistic realities allow for input in more than one named language and output in more than one language in speech events. As reported earlier, the secondary school classroom multilingual encounters in the South African township like Soweto, Tembisa, Alexandra and Katlehong (Nkadimeng and Makalela, 2015) offer a unique space to define complexities of how information flows between the learners and their teachers, on the one hand, and between the learners themselves where input and output are exchanged in at least six named languages. Most children growing in these contexts will have communicative proficiency in more than 3 languages by the time they are aged 6 (an optimal age for full mastery of one’s home language). As stated earlier, the notions of mother tongue and first language are problematic since they do not reflect the acquisition and proficiency modalities of these contexts. For convenience of the school choice of languages, these children often mention any language they perceive to be preferred either by the teacher or indeed their parents at home. Their choices therefore do not represent linguistic proficiencies, but historical identities largely based on ethnicities

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rather than languages. Teachers who grow up in these contexts also develop similar linguistic ability where they choose at any given point to give an output in more than one language while teaching. I have consistently observed that different teachers assigned to a variety of subjects use different language varieties to the extent that each teacher may be associated with about three named language varieties for their classroom communication; learners on the other hand, communicate with one another in a variety of language forms to make sense of the content as they would normally communicate in their communities. The teachers talking to students in a variety of languages represents vertical flow of information while students talking to one another cross-pollinate the ideas learned through a variety of language represents a horizontal flow of information. Either stream of information flow is incomplete for multilingual speakers in these complex encounters and will need to depend on each other for a complete sense of meaning making and self-affirmation. It is in this connection of flow complexity that the pillars of Ubuntu translanguaging, namely: “I x We”, incompletion, interdependence, vertical and horizontal axis create discontinuation continuation: constant disruption of language and literacy boundaries and simultaneous re-creation of new ones. In everyday speech, the journey of multilingual speakers is to cross boundaries of named languages, overlap, disrupt features of one language by constantly drawing from and replacing with features of other languages without losing focus of the meaning making process- making sense of the world around them and of who they are. This fluid mobility that is unrestricted by boundaries of named languages is best described as discontinuation continuation within the Ubuntu translanguaging model. Makalela (2019) argues that this way of meaning making mirrors the state of mind where languages are not bounded as sealed or boxed units when speakers are engaged in silent or loud meaning making event.

9.5 Ubuntu translanguaging pedagogy For classroom interactions, translanguaging allows teachers to use this cultural competence of Ubuntu to create opportunities for complex information flow where input and output are exchanged porously for meaning making. Garcia’s (2009) notion of dynamic bilingualism is useful to consider alternative models for content subjects and literacy in schools as suggested hereunder: What is needed today are practices firmly rooted in the multilingual and multimodal language and literacy practices of children in schools of the twenty-first century, practices that would be informed by a vision starting from the sum: an integrated plural vision. (Garcia, 2009: 8)

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This vision, espoused in Ubuntu requires pedagogical strategies where more than one language is used for instruction. I have shown elsewhere what Ubuntu translanguaging pedagogy process as follows (Makalela, 2014, 2015): – Turn and talk: “I learn because you learn” Although turn and talk is considered a brain-based learning technique, it is used in UTP as a social activity focusing on an Ubuntu principle of inclusive learning, “I learn because you learn”. Community or group learning often found in traditional African societies allows students to model or demonstrate their learning with the teacher taking the role of a facilitator or enabler. Instead of approaching learning as an individual brain activity, UTP allows for extended opportunities to create groups to solve new problems or reinforce learning. During the group tasks, the instructor facilitates moments for students to listen and speak back in a variety of languages understood within the small group. Students who struggle to understand the content taught have this opportunity to learn from peers who may have grasped different parts of the lesson. The instructor will set time limits for the first set of interactions and then allow students to move to the next group (visitor come to my ‘house’) till a saturation point is reached, which is typically followed by reports to the whole group. The main tenet of “I learn because you learn” is that all possible languages and non-verbal communication cues are used to deepen understanding. – Phonological awareness contrasts Teaching non-cognate languages often in early literacy creates phonological gaps that can only be detected once both languages are used simultaneously in speaking and listening tasks. The UTP approach is to contrast sound patterns for selected group of languages. For example, English vowel system and syllabic structure requires explicit attention to phonological awareness because its orthographic system is not transparent. Pronunciation of /s/, for example, in words such as cats, dogs, and horses varies significantly whereas most Bantu languages are highly predictable with more transparent orthography. Another example is syllabic variation where no one syllable carries a full meaning segment in African languages of Bantu origin whereas English uses monosyllabic words as starting point for word comprehension (e.g., speak, like, eat). The idea here is to compare and contrast sound systems in different languages as a basis for further acquisition.

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– Read aloud contrasts The rhythm of reading developed in early literacy is often found to be influenced by languages that the student is already familiar with. Although the outcome is oral reading proficiency in a specific language, the teacher encourages students to bring samples of reading texts to be read in class so that oral reading fluency from the familiar language/s can be directly transferred or identified as the source of reading challenges in the target language/s. Texts in different languages and pre-recorded readings in these languages can be sourced for use in the classrooms. – Word/sentence walls in different language A UTP teacher would put up words, phrases and sentences on the walls or writing board for students to see the similarities and differences at the same time. Versions in other languages can be developed by the teacher or students after having read texts in the target language/s. This side by side approach can be used to teach from words to word order (morphosyntax) and any concepts any learning area. – Writing sections in different languages to foster critical multilingual thinking Premised on the philosophy of writing as thinking, learners are encouraged to use writing (usually low stakes) to stimulate critical thinking. Critical multilingual thinking implies that, at various stages of students’ draft prose, different languages known to the students are leveraged to promote deep thinking over the subject matter. This language mix could be within and between paragraphs or whole texts. Another alternative here is to have students write first drafts in any language/s of their preference so as to enable their multilingual creativity without a hinderance of one language structures. The principle here is that students tend to produce high quality writing system if their familiar languages are used as resources for meaning making. They do not only develop a voice, but also metalinguistic awareness or metaliteracy (Coady, Makalela, and Lopez, 2019) of the different rhetorical structures that they navigate through to produce the final product. – Input and output exchange: the four macro-skills This task is a classical translanguaging view of input and output exchange via different languages. The students here read a text in one language and then write about the text in a different language. This however assumes that languages other than the medium of learning and teaching have writing systems and that the students have a basic understanding of the written forms. For oral

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conversations, students receive input in one or more languages and then give a spoken output in different languages and vice-versa. – Multilingual corners Multilingual literacy corners entail students reading stories or any text genres and being allowed to reconstruct the texts in different languages in their own way and the preferred language forms, if any. At the end of this activity, each student will have an opportunity to ‘own’ at least versions of the same text in different languages. These are published at one selected corner in the classroom for rehearsal or revisions in the future. – Reading walls in different languages Students read texts in a target language and then asked to re-tell a story/event and phenomenon in any or combination of their familiar languages. The classroom walls are used as text reconstruction space where different pieces of the story are pasted in a sequence of the original text. The UTP approach described above carries the Ubuntu principle of “I am because you are” and its extended application of “one language is because another is” and “I learn because you learn”. While most of the processes explained are found broadly in pedagogical models for best practices worldwide, the UTP brings the human approach based on the real language practices of speakers of Bantu languages and their ways of knowing and being. These processes, used in combination or singly, take away the central role of the teacher and provide a disruptive classroom situation where both the students and teachers go there daily to learn. While the approach has more language and literacy focus, it is applicable in other content areas of learning. A plethora of studies conducted on the effectiveness of this pedagogy has shown that this practice improves access to knowledge and affirms students’ identities (e.g., Makalela, 2015, 2017; Madiba, 2014). One of the reasons translanguaging practices succeed in classrooms is that multilingual students are already involved in the process of linguistic exchange despite the fact that their curriculum privileges monolingualism. Garcia makes this salient point explicit: Despite curricular arrangements that separate languages, the most prevalent bilingual practice in the bilingual education classrooms is that of translanguaging. Because of the increased recognition of the bilingual continuum that is present in schools and communities that are revitalizing their languages, or schools where more than one language group is present, linguistically integrated group work is prevalent in many bilingual classrooms. Here, students appropriate the use of language, and although teachers may carefully plan when and how languages are to be used, children themselves use their entire linguistic repertoires flexibly. Often this language use appropriation by students is done surreptitiously. (Garcia, 2009: 304)

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One would add that even though some classroom may police language use and punish children for using more than just the language of learning and teaching, the languages co-exist in their phonological loop- a mental lexicon where words and sentences are generated. In other words, translanguaging is a representation of cognitive linguistic fluidity where language repertoires co-exist either before or after speech interactions. Attempts to avoid this cognitive process are not tenable and often prove counterproductive. The cognitive benefits of translanguaging, on the other hand, surpass those of monolingual readers and writers in literacy encounters. Baker (2011) puts this in perspective as follows: It is possible in a monolingual teaching situation, for students to answer questions or write an essay about a subject without fully understanding it. Processing for meaning may not have occurred. Whole sentences or paragraphs can be copied or adapted out of a textbook, from the internet or from dictation by the teacher without real understanding. It is less easy to do this with ‘translanguaging’. To read and discuss a topic in one language, and then to write about it in another language, means that the subject matter has to be processed and ‘digested’. (Baker, 2011: 289)

9.6 Multilingual policy developments Multilingualism in institutions of higher learning is often misconceived to the extent that language policies do not take off the ground. A plethora of research on language policy and planning in Africa (Mazrui, 1978, 1997, 2002; Bamgbose, 2005; Alexander, 1989; Prah, 1995, Makalela, 2005) has consistently shown lack of progressive action and political will to implement policies that promote the use of African languages for learning and teaching. As a result, the ex-colonial languages continue to have a vantage point over the indigenous African languages in all domains of high prestige such as education, corporate business and parliament. Policy developments in the South African universities show that the institutional identities remained unchanged. When reflecting on the carryover of the colonial education system into the new dispensation, the prevalence of monolingual identity seems strong: South Africa have had a modicum of experience of using languages other than English as medium of instruction at university level. . . . that experience has been considerably restricted and watered down in the post-apartheid era where English will possibly be almost the sole medium of instruction available. Ribeiro (2010 :25)

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Ribeiro reveals that there has been a slight shift at universities, which favours English monolingualism from the Apartheid system where both English and Afrikaans became the only languages for academic and administrative functions. In other words, the visible change is that English attained more clout than Afrikaans with most Afrikaans medium universities changing to English only policies. McKinney’s (2016) framework of Anglonormativity reminds us that the university campuses have normalized the view that everyone should learn in English while other alternatives are neglected. This means that the African lived experience is based on the norms of the English university values, which have become entrenched as common knowledge and truth. Like in the basic education sector, sustaining apartheid-developed policies sits at odds with the promises of the Constitution and language clauses and policies that sought to redress imbalances of the past and enhance equality, parity of esteem and social justice (e.g., Probyn, 2019). Language practices at universities are, in the main, directly opposed to the provisions of the 2002 National Language Policy for Higher Education, which sought to provide a blue print for multilingual universities in South Africa. This policy makes specific reference to the use of African languages at university level as in Clause 6: The challenge facing higher education is to ensure the simultaneous development of a multilingual environment in which all our languages are developed as academic/scientific languages, while at the same time ensuring that the existing languages of instruction do not serve as a barrier to access and success. (DoE, 2002: Clause 6)

This clause refers to knowledge and success in attaining the educational goals as indicators for a transformed university identity and culture. The consequence of marginalizing mother tongue speakers of African languages is that academic literacy and overall academic achievement of these students continue to be an academic tragedy with high failure, drop out and low throughput rates.

9.7 The speaker and the hearer in multilingualism One of the reasons for the state of policy paralysis at schools and universities is the ideologies that underpin the conception of a multilingualism. These institutions have, mistakenly, adopted the traditional view of languages as sealed units and bounded entities that have separate structures or forms of what the society names as English, isiZulu or Sepedi. This point of view regards a language as its form, shape and structure and as a reified object that is often treated independent of its user.

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Ubuntu translanging and the posthuman views of languages (see also Kleyn and Garcia, 2019) have agitated for an epistemological shift from what languages look like to what multilingual speakers do with languages. This epistemological shift has taken shape in reconceptualizing multilingualism as an arena where speakers utilize all forms of discursive resources (semiotic, linguistic, modal) available to them and cross over linguistic boundaries when they engage in a meaning making process (Garcia and Li Wei, 2014; Li Wei, 2015; Blackledge and Creese, 2017; Makalela 2019, Turner and Lin, 2020). According to Kleyn and Garcia (2019), the prefix “trans” indexes a transformation of language structures by going beyond them. Yet moving beyond the structures does not mean that these do not exist socio-culturally (i.e., what the society values and names). They who posit that: The line between the important socio-cultural constructions that are separate named languages and the unitary language system of human beings need to be firmly drawn. (P. 79)

Here, the authors recognize the paradox of translanguaging and recast the debate on whether multilingual speakers conceive of their languages as differentiated units or united into a single repertoire in their cognitive dimension (see MacSwan, 2017; Otheguy, Reid and Garcia, 2015, 2019; Paradowski, 2020). Translanguaging research identifies the differentiated argument as following a social construction of named languages that are separate from one another. This is also called external language (E-language). On the other hand, the speaker’s own use of languages for meaning making follows a one unitary pathway, which is a psychological linguistic cross over in the process of meaning making. This pathway is internal to the speaker (I-Language) in that more languages are used in a blended unified form (i.e., repertoire) to make sense of the world and of the speakers’ sense of self. Using ubuntu translanguaging, Makalela (2019) clarifies the translanguaging paradox by using the hearer and speaker positionalities at the moment of speech and conversations. He refers to the unitary viewpoint as a speaker perspective because this mode of using repertoires that transform named languages is internal to the speaker who may not be conscious of the transitions he or she makes from one language segment to another. In other words, this is an internal procedure that the speaker ‘soft-assembles’ (Garcia and Li Wei, 2014) various discursive resources in the meaning making process. On the corollary, the differentiated pathway is viewed as hearer-perspective since this view of language is dependent on the judgment of the hearer through socially constructed names (i.e., the society or speech community). Put differently, it is the hearer who perceives different language forms or sounds- not necessarily the speaker. The speaker crosses over

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boundaries while engaged in speaking, writing or meaning making broadly (I-language) and similarly, the hearer (outsider) would identify words or phrases coming out of the speaker as a representation of the socially named languages (E-language). It is this complex view of the hearer-speaker matrix that is at the centre of translanguaging paradox and of how contemporary thinking on multilingualism should be understood and aligned with policy imperatives and practice guides. Because the named languages were imposed under the colonial policy of divide-and-rule to further difference and inequalities, the South African education systems need to review policies to redress inequalities on social identities and self image. In this connection, the call for change means reorienting multilingualism to include idiolects (repertoires) of meaning making that go beyond the structure. As will be shown in the next chapter, the boundary crossing through I-languages is referred to as horizontal multilingualism whereas what the society sees as differentiated structures is vertical multilingualism. Since neither one is sufficient, there is a need for a balanced account of multilingualism with meaning being the overriding principle (i.e., speakers’ internal meaning making process).

9.8 Ubuntu informed language-in education policy It is evident from the discussion above that South Africa is a linguistically complex country that has not yet harnessed the possibility of tapping from its linguistic resources to its cultural advantage. Under the aegis of ubuntu translanguaging as a compass for new language in education policy, the world views and cultural competencies of multilingual speakers should take a center stage. This means an intentional mission of pre-colonial rediscovery and self-definition as aptly expressed in the preface to Let Africa Lead (Khoza, 2013) by the former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki who states: I have been exhorting Africans, and especially the intelligentsia to define themselves so that we, as a people, can devise and implement our own political and socioeconomic programmes of action. We have to meet prevailing global challenges from within our own worldview and proceed to action from our own authentic possibilities based on the culture and competencies of Africans themselves. (p xi)

This quote suggests that multilingualism should be informed by an ideological departure from separatist world views of colonialism and premised on the plural world view encapsulated in ubuntu, a locus of African humanism that values

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social, territorial, cultural and linguistic fluidity (Makalela 2014). While ubuntu is essentially a philosophy and a way of life for many Africans, its principles of belonging together, discontinuation continuation and interdependence provide a useful framework to see how African languages cross-pollinate and to offset rigid boundaries between the 11 official languages that are based on one-ness ideology and Western interpretations of multilingualism. Specifically, a trifocal language in education policy that valorises linguistic cross-overs in practice is the most logical choice for South Africa. It is specifically important here to highlight the translanguaging paradox when it comes to policy. It is accepted that the society recognize language structures as isiZulu or Sesotho, for example. Yet the speakers of these named languages (externally named multilingualism) go beyond these boundaries when engaged in meaning making processes (internally operational multilingualism). A dynamic language in education policy is the one that recognizes both versions of naming and going beyond names for learning and teaching. This version of policy is a simultaneous recognition of both vertical (adoption of socially named languages) and horizontal (disrupting boundaries for meaning making) multilingualism. Departing from separation of languages as ‘boxed’ entities, the language policy will make allowances for meaning making drawn from more than one languages in the classrooms. The principles of policy for the named languages should provide for cross-pollination as follows: a. Nguni language speakers to choose a Sotho language as a school subject b. Sotho languages speakers to learn Nguni languages as school subjects c. English, Afrikaans and minority African languages, with a choice of either a Sotho or Nguni language. d. Majority language speakers to learn minority languages.

9.9 Conclusion To conclude, it is important to note that the majority of South African children are exposed to more than three socially named languages before they are six years old. In other words, the language policy scenarios depicted above are already socially active, but not recognized officially and in education. In most of these hybrid spaces such as the use of the blend of Nguni, Sotho, English and Afrikaans, referred to as Kasi-taal, in the Black townships (Makalela 2013, 2014), the named boundaries between the languages are increasingly weakening to despite many years of linguistic boxing through colonisation and Apartheid. It is

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uncommon to hear languages of input and output juxtaposed in dialogues in all spheres of life: the media, education, informal settlements, city-centres and malls. This fluid use of languages is possible due to the cultural competence in accommodating variation, without conflict. It is in this connection that Ubuntu is a latent cultural competency and a resource to redress the ideological challenges of monolingualism.

Chapter 10 Not eleven languages: Harmonizing and translanguaging in concert We have to meet prevailing global challenges from within our own worldview and proceed to action from our own authentic possibilities based on the culture and competencies of Africans themselves. (Khoza, 2013: xi)

10.1 Introduction The focus of this book was to pursue the question on whether South Africa has, from the speakers point of view, 11 languages that have been accorded an official status in the Constitution (SA, Act 108 of 1996). From the grand scheme of linguistic enumeration in Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of languages in the region is dependent on the viewpoints of each researcher and their conception of what a language is. To date, the South African language policy of 11 official languages has not been implemented to obtain the constitutionally ordained derivatives such as parity of esteem and equity. Previous chapters reported on failure to implement multilingualism, especially in education where speakers of indigenous African languages are proportionately disadvantaged. Some of the reasons for failure are founded in predictable myths such as limited financial resources, lack of African language corpus and the fear that harmonization of language orthographies will lead to sudden death of these languages. Two complementary facts come to the fore in various parts of the book. The first one is marginalization of these languages into the periphery as a result of the carryover from the colonial and Apartheid regimes. Second, it is both an ontological and epistemological question on what makes a language in the process of making meaning and how multilingual speakers with Bantu African languages background come to know. This chapter briefly reviews key ideas developed throughout the book and makes specific arguments based on the African worldview and competencies (Khoza, 2013).

10.2 The 11 language policy paradox Do we have 11 languages? What is the basis for our belief in multiple languages? These are taken for granted questions, but when engaged deeply, the answers challenge our conditioned lenses that are monolingually biased. In the beginning https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614515067-010

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of the book, we explored the idea of an African identity through South Africa’s well-known speech: I am an African. As described in the speech, we get an African character that relates to the environment, other human beings and the cosmic creation in which Africans are a part of. In this speech, the complexities of language, culture and the extent to which these myriad networks and multiple layers of being an African provide an identity DNA of plural beings. Having acknowledged the atrocities that were brough about by European colonization, the speech depicts an identity complexity that includes outsiders. What we have gathered from the speech is that multilingual Africans see themselves as interconnected human beings. This is how they view world, get connected to it, make sense of it and transform it in their everyday ways of meaning making. Africans, as well as their cultural resources, lived in a state of interdependence where one could safely claim that one is incomplete without the other. The implications of seeking the truth to transform the African linguistic landscape means digging into the pre-colonial era and the African ways of conversation within the realm of who they are. The use of “I am an African” helps one ask deep linguistic questions. The second observation is with regard to social attempts to create boundaries between languages in order to control. In the second chapter, a comparison of language to life metaphor was introduced (Shohamy, 2006) to stretch the idea that African languages were involved in a language wars in different historical epochs from the colonial period. These wars took different shapes and have still not ended even after a legal framework where 11 languages have been accorded an official status. As seen elsewhere in Africa, the constitution statements are bold, yet the implementation is weaker and as Bamgbose (2000) noted, these statements accumulate dust due to lack of feasible language plans. We have shown in the preceding chapters that South African multilingualism has been understood and written from Eurocentric perspective that is imbued by oneness ideology of the European enlightenment period. Conceptions of inclusivity led to the adoption of 11 official languages; yet the integration approach was missed out due to the default interpretation of the African linguistic milieu within the remit of nation statism. Chapter 3 of this book is explicit in showing that South Africa does not have in reality have 11 official languages. The genesis of these multiple languages comes from the missionary errors and mis hearings. The labels used for isiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele and Siswati were then enforced under the colonial mission to rule and divide the majority of the people in the country. The missionary linguists, who represented different denominations, worked in an uncoordinated fashion in different parts of the country where they founded languages they perceived to be different and put them into written forms. Beyond this, colonization

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created immersion and assimilatory language policies to assure cultural and linguistic domination by the colonizing country. Despite the work of the missionaries and misrepresentation of African languages, the practices within African languages shows a resilience towards border crossing in the 21st Century. Several chapters showed mutual intercomprehensibility of languages within the Sotho cluster (Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana), which can be extended to Nguni cluster (isiZulu, isiXhosa, SiSwati and isiNdebele). Speakers within each cluster are not only able to engage in ordinary conversation, they showed a natural ability to engage with high order thinking level discourses. Re-writing of the orthographies of these languages, as demonstrated, will have economic, cultural and developmental advantages that are not accrued in the current orthographic order and the myths that are mistakenly taken as facts. The second border crossing is with regard to their use in hybrid forms in kasi-taal. Here, the 21st century has provided amble opportunities for many African states to ‘exploit’ the fluid, hybrid social and linguistic spaces brought about by intranational and international mobility to reclaim their values that are embedded in the cultural competence and own worldviews. It was argued that the notion of translanguaging as a norm in multilingual South Africa has a transforming effect in that the boundaries between the languages are disrupted to give way for new ones in a dialectic process of discontinuation continuation under the aegis of ubuntu translanguaging. It was stated throughout the book that for African discourse practices to take root and be valorised in their own right, there is a need to leverage on the ancient value system of ubuntu- where linguistic, cultural and human boundaries were always fluid and versatile as in the inscription: I am because you are; you are because I am. Taken together, ubuntu translanguaging can be appropriated for policy development, classroom practices, and pedagogical strategies where more than one named language is used for learning and teaching in any content area. It is in this connection that vertical multilingual statement of 11 official languages is de facto an inaccurate description of the sociolinguistic realities of South Africa. Even for administrative purposes, harmonized orthographies of into at least 2 major groups, will in the future be a driving force for intellectualizing the languages and developing new terminology for use in academic contexts and many related domains of a South African life. Yet these forms will always be disrupted horizontally when speakers are engaged in meaning making process.

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10.3 A horizontal angle to multilingual policies This book stressed that the challenges for the South African schooling and universities on the implementation of multilingual policy rests in the fact that multilingualism is misconstrued as multiple monolingualisms. Both the Department of Basic Education’s Language in Education Policy and the Language Policy for Higher Education make reference to multilingualism as the overriding principle. The former specifies the need to use more than one language for learning and teaching while the former emphases the inclusion of African languages as languages of learning, teaching and research. It is instructive, however, to note that that assignment of languages with a status as official does not take into account the fluid nature of the languages and how multilingual speakers in essence use languages fluidly and seamlessly beyond the named languages. In this understanding of languages as their form and structure, languages tended to be pitied against in each. The outcome of this vertical conception of language hierarchies results in a Matthew Effect: the stronger are getting stronger and the weaker are getting weaker where English and Afrikaans become better resourced while African languages remain resource-poor with this unequal status quo continuing beyond Apartheid and colonial administration era. Furthermore, the studies reported in this book show that higher education and basic education institutions follow what is referred to as vertical multilingual orientation (see Heugh 2014; Probyn 2019). That is, every language stated in the policy is seen as a bounded entity without relationships, intersections and overlaps. I refer to this notion of separate development as monolingual multilingualism (see also Makoni and Severo, 2017), which is in tandem with the Apartheid policy of separate development and the colonial ideology of oneness. Ironically, these vertical policy formulations make it hard for implementation because they do not reflect ‘normal’ language use, where there are overlaps in tandem with the everyday use of languages for meaning making and of speakers expressing their identity positions. With systemic failures in implementation of multilingual policies, there is a need to make alternative policy provisions and reinterpretations. A direct addition to vertical multilingualism is horizontal multilingualism, which accommodates translanguaging practices that can be explicitly promoted through policy. This type of multilingualism disrupts the pristine models of language boundaries and provides for cross pollination of language features that go beyond the boundaries of one named language for meaning making. In this connection, it is fitting to refer to this version as multilingual multilingualism for its dynamic tolerance of linguistic repertoires in the process of meaning making. From Mazrui’s

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notion of horizontal counter-penetration as a decolonizing strategy, multilingual multilingualism disrupts the establishment of colonial boundaries between languages and recreates new discursive ones to enrich educational experience, understanding and self-knowledge where meaning is the overriding principle for language use. It is important to note a balanced multilingual frame that includes both the vertical (social naming) and horizontal (use beyond one language) at the same time is an epistemological conflict, which is necessary where there is an orchestra of order and disruptions co-existing to address the evolving needs of multilingual learners and students in contemporary classrooms.

10.4 Disrupting old boundaries and re-creating new ones Under the notion of ubuntu translanguaging, chapters in this book (see also Makalela, 2015; 2016; 2018) have shown that multilingual speakers of African languages have a cultural competence underpinned by the African values systems of ubuntu. This value system is traced from the Limpopo Valley where speakers of various African languages demonstrated a complex ability to use more than one language in fluid, mobile and versatile ways. The basic tenet of ubuntu translanguaging is its paradox found in the saying: I am because you are; you are because I am. The orchestra of “I” and “we” offers a window through which individuality and collectivism co-exist in a shared identity space. The complex intersection between the I and the We in ubuntu reflects a dialectical dimension of plural and singular identities: We becomes the I and then the I becomes the We while their separatism is possible and strengthened simultaneously. Co-existence in separate and merged forms at the same time is grounded in the conception of discontinuation and continuation of ubuntu translanguaging, which is defined elsewhere (Makalela, 2016; 2018a; 2019) as disruption of orderliness and simultaneous recreation of new discursive forms. The South African multilingual students, especially those with African language backgrounds, display this cultural competence where no one named language is incomplete without the other. This is evident in some of the observed multilingual tutorials reported in the chapters in this volume. A language policy that is guided by the ubuntu translanguaging does not only help disrupt the domination of one language reserved for the pristine models of academia, but it places African identities at the centre of knowing, being and acting. Theoretically, ubuntu translanguaging is transformative in that it collapses both the vertical (differentiated E-languages listed in the policy statements) and the horizontal multilingual zones. The latter, which encompasses I- languages or repertoires, brings to light a collapse of boundaries of individuality for

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meaning making process. It seems reasonable to argue that unless the “We” index of the languages in their orchestra of meaning making drives policy, it will remain surreptitious, hidden and therefore not productive. Since the ubuntu philosophy is widely shared across a spectrum of speakers of all abantu languages, it is a candidate for use in interpreting the African multilingualism question and to pitch knowledge production and consumption based on this cultural competence. It is noted that outside of its panAfrican relevance (Kamwangamalu, 1999), Ubuntu shares features of other related philosophies in the South geopolitical context. One of these is the Latin American philosophy of Buen Vivir- an indigenous Andean value system that emphasizes community well-being, reciprocity, solidarity and humanity with Pachamama (Mother Earth) (Williford, 2018). In the global South geopolitical context, it offers a non-Western decolonial model in the sense of domestication as well as both the vertical and horizontal counter penetration phenomena (Mazrui 1978:350) where African languages and English share the same classroom space in all subjects. Equally, it offers an innovative model for Western states to address the complex and dynamic classrooms they experience in the 21st Century.

10.5 Specific policy recommendations There are specific recommendations that combine both versions of multilingualism alongside the key themes emerging from the preceding chapters. Here is a list of the recommendations: 1) Harmonization of the orthographies of mutually intelligible languages to reduce the number of linguistic mis inventions; 2) Incremental introduction of African languages as media of learning and teaching from Grade 4; 3) A trifocal language-in education policy where learners and students should exit their education system with at least one named African language other than their own as follows: a. Nguni language speakers to choose a Sotho language as a school subject; b. Sotho languages speakers to learn Nguni languages as school subjects; c. English, Afrikaans, with a choice of either speakers choose from the following: Xitsonga, Tshivenda, Sotho or Nguni language; d. Xitsonga and Tshivenda speakers choose either Sotho or Nguni language; 4) Pedagogical translanguaging promoted via policy for meaning making in school and university subjects;

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Chapter 10 Not eleven languages: Harmonizing and translanguaging in concert

5) Compulsory learning of named African languages at least for 6 months as a requirement for completion of all degree programmes at universities and colleges. The conditions of learning a language other than one’s own apply as in recommendation 3 above.

10.6 Conclusion As we conclude this book it is important to go back to the question on whether South Africa has 11 official languages. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa declared 11 languages as official in order to redress the imbalances of the past and to promote indigenous African languages for equity and parity of esteem. However, when one traces the creation of the languages, it is poignantly revealing that the indigenous African languages were invented to break up the majority power of the speakers during colonial period and this divide and rule strategy was reinforced through 10 Bantustan homelands during Apartheid period from 1948 till 1993. The evidence presented in this volume show that differentiation of indigenous African languages was created /invented by the missionary linguistics who intended to translate the Bible for the local people and then used them for education in the first three years of schooling. African linguists observed these mis-inventions and carried out studies that showed linguistic congruence within various clusters of Bantu languages. From this view point there is a case for orthographic harmonization to reduce costs and to have common standards that can be used across a wider spectrum of the past language divisions as a form of redress. Second, research on actual language use showed a high level of mutual inter-comprehensibility that was measured through cooperative principles and reading literacy performance across speakers of Sotho languages. These findings extend to the Nguni languages cluster. Third, the South African townships showed a fluid use of local languages that have evolved into a local lingua franca referred to as kasi-taal, which reveals a multilingual cultural competence that cuts across all the official languages of South Africa. Going beyond the colonization period through the Sankofa philosophy of fluid temporality, it is evident that ancient Africans have always had the cultural competence of using more than one language to make meaning. The Great Limpopo Valley with its endowment of multiple but interdependent languages offers a treatise on ubuntu as a way of life and a compass from which African multilingualism can be theorised and modelled for pedagogical innovations under Ubuntu translanguaging: and Ubuntu Translanguaging (UT) Pedagogy (UTP), respectively. In this connection, there is a need to reinterpret multilingualism to fit

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in with the cultural competence of discontinuation continuation where there is a constant disruption of rigid orderliness and simultaneous recreation of new fluid and overlapping boundaries. This implies that the current vertical conceptualization of multilingualism is insufficient as the case is with the 11 official language policy of multiple monolingualisms. Under the aegis of the UT, mis-inventions or artificial boundaries of these socially named languages are disrupted through a horizontal flow that is meaning-centred. This paradox of recognizing socially named languages (E-language or hearer-viewpoint) and yet going beyond them (trans-) is a norm where no one language is complete in the meaning making process (I-language or speaker viewpoint) without the other. When framed in this light, policy directions informed by UT are urgently needed to affirm identity positions of multilingual speakers and foster epistemic access of learners and students whose languages remain in the margins of education, amongst other domains of prestige. In brief, the narrative of 11 official languages as separate entities has no decolonial, cultural, linguistic and fluid users basis. It is an amazing fact that South Africa, like its sister Sub-Saharan countries, has come to normalize multiplicity lingua invention of colonization. Language predicts sustainable under the philosophy of self-reliance (Nyerere, 1967, 1968) and Mbeki’s call: We have to meet prevailing global challenges from within our own worldview and proceed to action from our own authentic possibilities based on the culture and competencies of Africans themselves. (Khoza, 2013: xi)

As demonstrated throughout the book, eleven official languages remains an external worldview and unauthentic to the nature of who Africans are. It is imperative for reforms and future policy developers to pursue the ontological and epistemic challenges from the point of view of being an African and from what is possible from within Africans themselves.

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Index 21st Century 7–9, 18, 24–26, 30, 34, 53, 101–102, 110, 115, 117, 124, 131–132, 144, 147, 151, 153–154, 157 African 3, 7–9, 13–14, 17–80, 98–110, 113, 115–116, 118, 120–129, 131, 133, 136–139, 140, 142–149, 151–158 – African multilingualism 3, 7, 9, 13, 15, 17–20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 32, 45–46, 50, 53–54, 61, 99, 116, 120–123, 125–129, 131, 136–140, 142–143, 145–149, 155, 157–8 – African world view 19–20, 123, 139, 142, 144, 149 Afrikaans 8, 21–25, 28, 30, 36–42, 50–51, 54, 57, 60, 61, 99, 103–104, 107, 11–113, 115–116, 127–129, 140–145, 147, 152, 156 Afrikanerization 37, 38 Afrophone 64 Anglicization 13, 34 Apartheid 7–8, 13, 15, 23, 25, 31, 37–41, 49, 50–52, 54, 59, 60–61, 70–71, 98–101, 103, 106, 118, 128–129, 136–137, 140, 142, 145, 153, 158 Assimilation 29, 53, 124, 128 Bantustan 37–38, 40, 49, 71, 105, 148 Bilingualism 24, 26, 36, 129, 132, 151–154, 159 Buen vivir 21, 122, 147, 159 CASAS 69, 153–158 Circumlocution 110, 111 Constitution 64, 66–67, 69, 179 Cultural competence 19, 177, 188, 201, 205, 208–210, 212–213, 236 Curriculum 47, 56, 178, 182, 193 Decolonization 15, 118, 120, 122, 124, 126, 154, 156 Dialect 14, 35, 38, 44–48, 58, 65–73, 77–78, 81–82, 89, 92–95, 97, 129–130, 144, 146

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614515067-012

Discontinuation continuation 188, 200, 205, 213 Dutchification 33 Dynamic bilingualism 8, 18, 20, 24, 26, 36, 54, 99, 129, 132, 145, 147, 151–154, 159 Education 7–9, 11, 15, 17–18, 23–26, 29, 31, 34, 36, 38–41, 44, 50, 52–54, 56, 59, 61–62, 65, 98, 104, 118, 125, 127–129, 135–137, 139–142, 145–149, 151–159 English 18, 21–25, 27–28, 30–31, 34–43, 50–55, 57, 60, 67, 99–100, 104, 107–113, 115–116, 124–125, 127–129, 133, 136–137, 140, 145, 147, 153–154, 156 Epistemic 23, 118, 125, 131, 149, 156 Epistemological 15, 19, 118, 125–126, 138, 142, 146 Harmonization 14, 34–35, 58–62, 64–69, 71–73, 78–79, 96, 115–116, 142, 147–148, 151, 156–157 Horizontal 16, 54, 126, 130–132, 139–140, 144–147, 149 – Horizontal counterpenetration 147, 154 – Horizontal multilingualism 140 Idiolect 139 Illocutionary 80–81, 84, 86–87, 89, 91–92, 154 Immersion 26, 53, 124–125, 127–128, 144 Immigration 25, 101 Incompletion 130–132 Infinite 19–20, 113, 122–123, 125, 130–131 Interdependence 53, 123, 131–132, 140–143 isiNdebele 58, 114, 127, 143–144 isiXhosa 21, 32, 35, 38, 41–42, 50, 58, 114, 127, 143–144 isiZulu 21, 32, 35, 38, 41–42, 50, 58, 108, 111, 114, 127, 137, 140, 143–144

146

Index

Languaging 3, 9, 15–17, 25–28, 53–54, 99, 103–105, 111–117, 126–136, 138–142, 144–148, 151–159 Language in education Language planning 55–56, 59, 61, 69, 72, 117, 136, 151, 153–155, 158–159 Language policy 14–16, 18, 21–23 Limpopo valley 121, 146, 148, 152 Lingua franca 26, 60, 68, 124, 148, 153 Linguistic imperialism 34, 118 Linguistic repertoires 18, 26, 86, 98–100, 102, 104, 106, 108–112, 114–116, 129–131, 136–146 Linguistic resources 8, 25–26, 32, 102, 105, 108–109, 114, 128, 142 Literacy 9, 14–15, 31–32, 43–44, 48, 53, 55, 59, 61, 72–73, 75, 77, 105, 128–129, 132–137, 148, 152–154, 158 Locutionary 80–81, 84, 86–87, 89, 91–92, 154 Maintenance 38, 53, 55, 127–129 Mapungubwe 120–123, 125, 152 Maxims 80, 84, 86–92, 95, 151 – Maxim of circumlocution 95 Migration 25, 101, 151, 158 Missionaries 34–35, 38, 43, 46, 48–49, 63, 144 Monoglossic 126, 158 Monolingual bias 15, 19, 28, 91, 118, 125, 142 Monolingualism 27–28, 129, 135, 137, 141, 145, 149 Monolingual multilingualism 131, 149 Multilingual multilingualism 146–147 Multilingualism 3, 7, 9, 13, 15, 17–20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 32, 45–46, 50, 53–54, 61, 99, 116, 120–123, 125–127, 131, 136–140, 143, 145–149, 151–153, 155, 157–158 Mutual intercomprehensibility 9, 15–17, 41, 63, 65–66, 68, 70–71, 73, 86, 99, 115, 147, 153 Mutual intelligibility 14, 20, 42–45, 47–48, 64–66, 69–70, 72–91–95, 97, 155–157

Ontological matrix 131 Orthography 46–47, 59, 68, 133, 154 Pan South African Language Board 21, 52, 157 Perlocutionary 80–81, 84, 92 Postcolonial 57, 151, 155–156 Precolonial 15, 42, 100, 120–121, 123, 139, 143 Proficiency 69, 87, 131, 134 Reading 4, 34, 59, 72–78, 94, 98, 133–135, 148, 155, 158 Relations of dependency 19–20, 35, 93, 95, 122–123, 129, 145 Sankofa 15, 118–119 Sepedi 21, 32, 35, 38, 41–42, 45, 47, 57–58, 66–70, 72–73, 76–77, 81–95, 97, 74, 111–112, 127, 137, 144, 114, 155 Sesotho 21, 32, 35, 38, 41–42, 45, 47, 57–58, 66, 67–70, 72–73, 76–77, 81–95, 97, 74, 111–112, 127, 137, 144, 114, 155 Setswana 21, 32, 35, 38, 41–42, 45, 47, 57–58, 66, 67–70, 72–73, 76–77, 81–95, 97, 74, 111–112, 127, 137, 144, 114, 155 Siswati 21, 32, 38, 41–42, 58, 60, 114, 143–144 Socially named languages 14, 17, 25, 27, 50, 79, 109, 138–140, 149 Sociolinguistics 9, 22, 25, 27, 102–104, 107, 110, 151–153, 155–156, 158 Soweto student uprising 13, 31, 39–40, 60, 103 Thabo Mbeki 17–20, 22, 24, 27, 37, 149 Township 54, 99–107, 110, 114, 116, 131, 140, 148 Translation 59, 57

Index

Translanguaging 9, 15–17, 25–28, 53–54, 99, 104–105, 111–116, 126–136, 138–142, 144–147, 151–159 Tsotsi taal 100, 103, 155 Ubuntu 16, 19–21, 27, 28, 53, 121–123, 125–134, 136, 138–142, 145–147, 151–157

147

– Ubuntu translanguaging 16, 19–21, 27–28, 53, 121–123, 125–127, 132, 134, 136, 138–142, 145–147, 151–157 Vertical axis 139 Vertical multilingualism 140