The Semiotics of New Spaces : Languaging and Literacy Practices in One South African Township [1 ed.] 9781928357995, 9781928357988

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The

Semiotics

New Spaces Languaging and Literacy Practices in one South African Township

CHARLYN DYERS

of

The Semiotics of New Spaces – Languaging and Literacy Practices in one South African Township Published by AFRICAN SUN MeDIA under the SUN PReSS imprint All rights reserved Copyright © 2018 AFRICAN SUN MeDIA and the author This publication was subjected to an independent double-blind peer evaluation by the publisher. The author and the publisher have made every effort to obtain permission for and acknowledge the use of copyrighted material. Refer all enquiries to the publisher. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic, photographic or mechanical means, including photocopying and recording on record, tape or laser disk, on microfilm, via the Internet, by e-mail, or by any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission by the publisher. Views reflected in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher. First edition 2018 ISBN 978-1-928357-98-8 ISBN 978-1-928357-99-5 (e-book) https://doi.org/10.18820/9781928357995 Set in Linux Biolinum 10.5/13 Cover design, typesetting and production by AFRICAN SUN MeDIA SUN PReSS is a licensed imprint of AFRICAN SUN MeDIA. Scholarly, professional and reference works are published in print and electronic format under this imprint. This publication can be ordered directly from: www.sun-e-shop.co.za africansunmedia.snapplify.com (e-books) www.store.it.si (e-books) www.africansunmedia.co.za



Table of Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 Part One ▪ Background 1 A Society on the Move and a Township of Migrants .................................. 9 2 Language Maintenance and Translanguaging: The Impact of Migration in Wesbank ............................................................. 23 Part Two ▪ Multilingual Literacies 3 Literacy, Language and Ideologies flowing into Wesbank ........................ 41 4 Portable Multiliteracies: Theory and Practice in Wesbank ....................... 51 5 Emotion, Voice and Agency in the Journals of Wesbank Women ............ 63 Part Three ▪ A ‘Messy Linguistic Market’ 6 The ‘Messy Linguistic Market’ of Wesbank .................................................. 79 7 Truncated Multilingualism: Theory and Practice ........................................ 97 8 Peripheral Normativity in Language Classrooms at Wesbank High School ......................................................................................... 107 Part Four ▪ Conclusion 9 Becoming a Channel for Voices from the Periphery: The Role of the Socially Responsible Sociolinguist ....................................................... 121 10 Afterword: Towards Equal Multilingualisms ................................................. 127

Quentin Williams

Selected Bibliography ................................................................................................. 133 Index ............................................................................................................................... 149

i

List of Figures

Figure 1.1

A Typical Scene Near the Main Business Hub in Wesbank ................. 11

Figure 1.2

A Typical ‘Simplex’ House ............................................................................ 12

Figure 1.3

A Local Government Sign ............................................................................. 13

Figure 1.4

Gang Graffiti ................................................................................................... 14

Figure 6.1

Handmade Sign ............................................................................................... 85

Figure 6.2

Rastafarian-themed Hair Salon .................................................................. 87

Figure 6.3

House Shop ...................................................................................................... 88

Figure 6.4

Informal Tavern ............................................................................................... 89

Figure 6.5

Mother City Hair Salon ................................................................................ 91

Figure 6.6

Cellular Service Shop ..................................................................................... 92

Figure 6.7 Butchery ........................................................................................................... 94

List of Tables

Table 1.1

Data Collected through Community Projects ........................................ 19

Table 1.2

School-based Data .......................................................................................... 21

Table 5.1

Examples of Affect .......................................................................................... 69

Table 5.2

Examples of Judgement ................................................................................ 71

Table 5.3

Examples of Appreciation ............................................................................. 72

Table 5.4

Examples of Engagement ............................................................................. 73

Table 9.1

Extract from Table 5.2 .................................................................................... 123

ii

Introduction

What this book is about The Semiotics of New Spaces – languaging and literacy practices in one South African township is a study of the ways in which people are responding, through their semiotic practices, to the intense socio-historical changes taking place in post-apartheid South Africa, as well as the conceptual revolution currently sweeping the field of sociolinguistics. It does so by focusing on a particular township that now houses people from different ethno-cultural backgrounds (in contrast to the rigid separation of races under the previous dispensation). The book therefore covers a range of related topics, including how cross-cultural, cross-linguistic families influence the language practices of their younger members; the impact of translingual friendships on language practices and attitudes; the ways in which older people use their existing literacies to negotiate the multilingual realities of the township as reflected in especially service delivery and the linguistic landscape; and aspects such as identity, voice and agency as markers of a developing participatory citizenship. In the context of South Africa, the township or sub-economic state housing development has achieved a very significant position as a site for sociolinguistic research. Even the most cursory of web searches reveal many papers and book chapters devoted to this space, ranging from studies of particular urban codes (Mesthrie, 1995; Dyers, 2008‑2014), to competing discourses in the construction of multicultural national identities (Chick, 2001; Chick & McKay, 2001) and language policy issues (De Klerk, 2002; Heugh, 2002; Kapp, 2000). The period post-1994, when the era of separate development or apartheid officially ended, only increased the range of sociolinguistic research projects in the townships. People of all races could now live in these housing developments. Arriving from different parts of a city, province or country, their languages, identities and cultures gradually began affecting, infiltrating and blending with those of other groupings, which naturally increased the interest in townships as sites of sociolinguistic research. For a period of more than a decade, accompanied by a number of postgraduate students and other researchers from the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the Flemish Universities of Ghent and Antwerp, I carried out sociolinguistic research in the township of Wesbank near the suburb of Kuils River in Cape Town,

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largely adopting ethno-methodological approaches. Our projects formed part of a more extensive research partnership between UWC and four Flemish universities in Belgium. The partnership, known as ‘The Dynamics of Building a Better Society’, was funded by the Flemish Inter-University Council. Each faculty at UWC followed a particular research theme, with the Faculty of Arts focussing on ‘Culture, Language and Identity’. In accordance with this overarching theme of ‘Culture, Language and Identity’, our sociolinguistic research began with a case study on culture, language and identity among school children in Wesbank township (Dyers, 2004). Further research was conducted on the language practices and attitudes of cross-lingual, cross-cultural families (Dyers, 2008a); the empowering effects participating in a multicultural theatre group had on Wesbank children (Popova, 2005); the maintenance of Afrikaans in this community (Dyers, 2008b); the impact of transnational migration on language practices (Dyers, 2009); how older people negotiate the linguistic landscape of the township using their existing literacies (Williams, 2012; Dyers & Slemming, 2014) and the role of identity, voice and agency as evidence of a developing participatory citizenship (Dyers, Williams & Barthus, 2012; Barthus, 2012). This book acknowledges the valuable contributions of the Flemish scholars who carried out research in this space. These were Jonckers and Newton (2004), who focused on urban strategies for poverty alleviation; Deslypere and Van Krunkelsven (2007), who examined the motivations of Wesbank children for learning English; and Muyllaert and Huysmans (2005), who carried out an ethnographic study on multilingualism and multiliteracy at Wesbank High School. More recently, Velghe (2014) completed a study on supervernacular literacy in the instant and text messaging of a particular Wesbank woman. The choice of the township in question is significant. Wesbank township is a developing community that was established in 1999. It is one of the first racially mixed housing developments in the Western Cape, following the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. It brought together people from mainly rural areas and of different races to cohabit, learn and work together. Moola (2002), as well as Achmat and Losch (2002) document how the Provincial Administration of the Western Cape (PAWC) decided in September 1995 to earmark Wesbank as an area to which minimum income/ maximum subsidy families could be relocated. This was their response to the growing crisis in housing provision due to the escalating influx of people from rural areas into urban Cape Town following the end of apartheid. Intended readership Students of sociolinguistics, with a particular interest in urban languaging and literacies, would find this book an interesting addition to their reading. Anyone interested in the linguistic realities of peripheral urban communities in post-apartheid South Africa could also find the content to be relevant and insightful.

2

Introduction

The contribution made by this book The subject of contemporary multilingualism is an ever-evolving field, and increasingly a source of cross-disciplinary research, particularly in societies marked by very rapid social change. Now, more than at any other period in history, the sociolinguist has to look to the historian, the geographer, the anthropologist, the psychologist, the sociologist, the political scientist and even the economist in order to make sense of what is happening in contemporary language and literacy practices. In addition, there is also “the newly recast critical sociolinguistics of multilingualism and multilingual literacy” (Martin-Jones, 2014: xi) to which this book, with its insights into multilingual literacies and language practices in a particular space, wishes to make a contribution. The fact that this space is a peripheral working-class area created to house different sets of migrants, in a country undergoing massive social change, leads us to two central questions: 1. What do people from diverse backgrounds do with their existing linguistic resources when moving to challenging new urban settings where they have to learn to coexist with people from very different backgrounds; and 2. What are the implications of such practices for community building, educational institutions and state language policies? The theoretical spine of this book is formed by three key but related concepts: peripheral normativity, truncated multilingualism and portable multiliteracies. In addition, the different language attitudes and ideologies – personal and societal beliefs about language inculcated virtually from birth – which permeate and influence the language practices of this ‘created’ community are also uncovered and should cast more light on these often misunderstood concepts. What relates the key concepts is that all three operate on different scales of ability, ranging from complexity and ‘completeness’ to more truncated versions – cut off at a particular stage of development owing to various factors such as access to education, location, poverty, dimensions of power, socio-political developments, and so forth. Thus, in the case of truncated multilingualism, it is possible to be highly proficient in one’s home languages (e.g. Afrikaans and isiXhosa), less proficient in a language learned at school (e.g. English) and limited to a few words and phrases of other languages. In other words, there is a type of ‘domain specialisation’ (Blommaert, Collins & Slembrouck, 2005a) which allows for a lot of natural communication to take place across linguistic and cultural barriers, with linguistic competencies varying greatly across different domains. For example, a teenager may have picked up urban slang in one blended code (e.g. South Africa’s Tsotsitaal) from his peers, showing the presence of different languages, but be unable to interact in one of those individual languages in other domains. This type of multilingualism, as will be shown in Chapter 7, is also influenced by a range of factors, such as language attitudes, levels of literacy, interpersonal relationships, access to quality education, social class, level of income and especially location.

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Truncated multilingualism is directly related to ‘peripheral normativity’ that can be found in the educational settings of deprived areas around the world. It occurs especially where children have to learn through the medium of either an additional language or a standardised variety not spoken in their informal environments. Blommaert, Muyllaert, Huysmans and Dyers (2005) contend that peripheral normativity is a type of grassroots literacy which is shared by teachers and pupils alike, enabling them to negotiate what serves as language ‘errors’ and what counts as acceptable language use. Through this they create norms of use that, while imperfect and less likely to pass in more formal environments, allow for teaching and learning to continue without the constant attention to error correction. In addition, given that the teachers, themselves, may be imperfect users of the target language, they are able to function as accessible models for their pupils by using a variety which is closer to the pupils’ own. This concept is extensively illustrated throughout the book and especially in Chapter 8. In addition to the truncated multilingualism and peripheral normativity of especially the more recent urban dwellers in poorer parts of many cities, there are the related literacies they brought with them from their original hometowns or rural villages – which we refer to as ‘portable multiliteracies’. These are defined by Dyers and Slemming (2014: 333) as: the migration to new spaces of particular multiliteracies acquired either informally or learned formally elsewhere by different individuals. Through collective sharing and activation, these multiliteracies are passed on to others, giving them particular strategies for negotiating these new spaces

In Chapter 4 we see how traditional support systems have been recreated in the township space by groups of women, allowing them to empower one another through whatever literacies they acquired prior to moving there. We also position literacy as going beyond the basic ability to read or write text and include oral forms of literacy, skills in negotiating texts like the linguistic landscape and mobile messaging, as well as decoding semiotic forms of communication such as dressmaking patterns. Therefore, this book offers a view of what literacy can mean in its most basic forms for people. As noted by graduate researcher Barthus (2011: 111) minimal literacy “reflects the most peripheral kind of insertion in economies of language and literacy resources, and it teaches us that even when literacy occurs as a very restrained and constrained set of practices, it functions locally”. How the book is organised The book is organised in four parts, each with its own set of chapters. Part One (chapters 1-2), provides the background and context to the book, with a description of recent South African translocal and transnational migration patterns, as well as a description of the township where the research was carried out. It goes

4

Introduction

on to consider the effects of migration on language variation and maintenance in this space. Part Two (chapters 3-5), captures the movement of people into the township carrying their particular semiotic luggage – mobile literacies, hybrid language practices and rural varieties not yet affected by urban languaging – as well as their language attitudes and ideologies. It considers what happens to their literacy resources once they settle in the township – which tools they use or develop for negotiating this space, which discourses begin to dominate, in-group and cross-group talk, the circulation of semiotic material, and the processes undergone in languaging and literacy development. Part Three (chapters 6-8), offers an analysis of the ‘messy linguistic market’ which has taken shape in this hybrid township – its linguistic landscape, the truncated multilingualism in cross-cultural families and the peripheral normativity practices in language classrooms. Part Four (chapters 9-10), firstly offers a consideration of the relationship between researchers and the researched in marginal spaces like Wesbank, with particular reference to the role of the responsible sociolinguist. It concludes with an afterword by sociocultural linguist Quentin Williams, author of Remix Multilingualism: Hip Hop, Ethnography and Performing Marginalized Voices (Williams, 2017). In his contribution, Williams responds to the main findings in the book, calling for ‘equal multilingualisms’ that challenge the monologic and structural-functional view of multilingualism. Essential background details for the reader It will be noted that both first person (I, my, me) and second person plural (we, our, us) are used throughout this text. The reason being that while at times I conducted research on my own, at other times I was leading teams of students and fellowresearchers into the township, and we shared our findings, as can be seen from the joint publications and theses. Also note that, for authenticity, no corrections were made to original texts in Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa as produced by our participants, but English translations have been added to assist the reader. It is with a deep sense of gratitude that I acknowledge the research contributions made by my colleagues: Jan Blommaert, Nathalie Muyllaert, Marieke Huysmans, Isa Deslypere, Liesbet Van Krunkelsven, Fatima Slemming, Vlada Popova, Tatum Barthus, Meggan Williams, Fie Velghe, Gil Jonckers and Caroline Newton, as well as the facilitators working for the former Iilwimi Centre (UWC): Jennifer Esau, Erica Williams, Alridge Jacobs and Mathilda Loff. Furthermore, I acknowledge the community of Wesbank, including the various school principals, for their

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willingness to interact with us. Without your contribution, neither this book nor the many research articles and chapters that have already been published, would have been possible. Throughout the book, for ease of reference, I use the racial categories of predemocracy South Africa to refer to the different South African ethnicities, as it continues to be used for classification purposes by the current dispensation. These categories are Black African in reference to those of Nguni or Sotho-Tswana descent, White in reference to those of European descent, Coloured to refer to those who draw their blended ancestries from Africa, Europe and Asia, and finally Indian or Asian, to refer to those of Asian descent. South Africa has 11 official languages, and the following figures indicate the percentage of mother tongue speakers of each language according to the 2011 SA Population Census (Census in Brief 2012: 27): Afrikaans (13,5%), English (9,6%), isiNdebele (2,1%), isiXhosa (16,0%), isiZulu (22,9%), Sepedi (9,1%), Sesotho (7,6%), Setswana (8,0%), siSwati (2,5%), Tshivenda (2,4%) and Xitsonga (4,5%). Note that in this book ‘Xhosa’ refers to the ethnic group while ‘isiXhosa’ refers to the language itself. Finally, I would like to conclude this section with a comment on townships and the spatial apartheid which continues to dominate contemporary South Africa to a large extent. The dormitory townships of the apartheid era were all created to house Black people before 1994, the year in which South Africa’s first democratic elections were held, thereby ending 300 years of colonialism and 40 years of apartheid (Oliver and Oliver, 2017). The South African Group Areas Act of 1950 forced people of different ethnic origin to live in areas demarcated for their specific group. The best areas were reserved for White occupants, with other groups being restricted to peripheral areas. Even in these peripheral areas, a strict hierarchy was maintained, with better areas allocated to those classified as Coloured and Indian and the worst areas to those classified as Black. It was not uncommon for people to attempt to get reclassified in order to access a better quality of life.

6

Introduction

1

7

1

A Society on the Move and a Township of Migrants

The post-modern society is a society ‘on the move’, a phenomenon the anthropologist Appadurai (1996) would describe as ‘flows’. There is a constant flow of people, ideas, money and technology, resulting in rapid urbanisation in most countries. The increasing pace with which people are moving to sprawling cities and forsaking the rural areas, holds multiple consequences for the ways in which societies are organised, the survival of particular cultures and the languages that are intimately connected to such cultures. Similar to the rest of the developing world, post-apartheid South Africa is currently in the process of a massive migration of people from rural to urban centres. This process is accompanied by residential and educational desegregation, new structural and organisational forms for the economy and the growth of popular culture as signified by e.g. the emergence of songs, poems and other forms of expression in ongoing borrowings and blendings between languages. Cape Town, the capital of the Western Cape Province of South Africa, records an inflow of approximately 50,000 new arrivals each year, mainly from the impoverished rural areas of the Eastern Cape Province (Deumert, Inder & Maitra, 2005: 306). The migrants from the Eastern Cape predominantly speak isiXhosa as their home language. However, translocal migration is also affecting other ethnic groups in South Africa, such as those officially labelled Coloured. Many people from this group are migrating to the city, especially from rural areas in the Western Cape and mining towns in the Northern Cape, having left or lost employment in the agriculture, fishing or mining sectors. These Coloured migrants are predominantly Afrikaansspeaking. Current census figures for Cape Town (Statistics South Africa, 2012) show that 35,69% of its inhabitants list Afrikaans as their main home language, while a further 29,82% lists isiXhosa, followed by English (28,40%). Other smaller language groups make up the remaining 6,09%. In South Africa, English functions as the main common language, and most people acquire it either informally in homes and communities and/or formally at schools as their first additional language. For many years now various scholars have debated the perceived dominant role of English in South Africa (Ridge, 2000, 2004; Webb,

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2002; Alexander, 2004) and the accompanying fears that other languages may die out as a result (De Klerk, 2000; Kamwangamalu, 2003). Such a large-scale shift, however, does not appear to be taking place in working-class and rural communities owing to, among others, the following factors: (i) the spaces inhabited by the rural and urban poor, (ii) a desperately over-burdened and largely ineffective state education system (Soudien, 2007; Taylor, 2007), (iii) historically low levels of literacy (Aitchison and Harley, 2006), and (iv) relatively low mobility for the poor and working class in post‑apartheid South Africa (Dyers, 2008). A number of chapters in this book, especially Chapter 2, offer a more detailed explanation of the factors which appear to inhibit the shift to English. In addition to the translocal migrants, Cape Town is now also home to many transnational migrants, especially from other African countries. Given its history as an important port located strategically between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, it could be argued that this is nothing new as people of diverse cultures and languages have been migrating to the Cape since the 17th century. However, as the apartheid regime only favoured certain groups of migrants (especially those of European descent), the diverse intake taking place since 1994 is of high significance. At any given time in Cape Town today we can find tourists, diasporic communities from different countries, and short- and long-term migrants (including students and political refugees), mainly from African countries like Zimbabwe, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Angola. Migrants from other continents appear to have integrated with varying degrees of success into South African society, or have gone about their business without attracting much attention. The situation is much bleaker for the more impoverished migrants from other parts of Africa, especially the millions of Zimbabweans who have fled the economic and political instability of their country. These people have had to face ethnocentrism (negative judgements on aspects of a different culture) and xenophobia (hostile, often violent responses to the presence of ‘strangers’) from especially Black South Africans (Jandt, 2004; Harris, 2002). It is against the background of these migration patterns that I introduce Wesbank as a township of multilingual and multicultural migrants newly created in postapartheid South Africa, and explain why this township is such an important site for sociolinguistic research. Wesbank township Wesbank township is one of the first multiracial townships constructed in post‑apartheid Cape Town. With migrants from various parts of South Africa and Africa, the diversity of its population alone and the various resources they bring with them from their places of origin make this a valuable site for research on language and literacy patterns.

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A Society on the Move and a Township of Migrants

As a sociolinguist, I was particularly interested in the linked aspects of culture, language and identity among these migrants, given their diversity of origin. Firstly, there was a confluence of ethnicities who had to find pathways towards peaceful coexistence and communication across ethnolinguistic and cultural barriers. Secondly, these translocal migrants also had to contend with another layer of diversity in the demographics of Wesbank – small numbers of transnational migrants from other African countries (mainly Somalia, the DRC and Nigeria) who settled in houses sublet to them by South African families who were themselves renting these houses. These migrants started small businesses like spaza (house) shops, mobile telephone kiosks and hairdressing shops. Wesbank can therefore be described as a hybrid community characterised by the fact that Black, Coloured and (some) White people are living in the same community (Joncker & Newton, 2004: 113-118): [d]ue to the dominance of socio-economic criteria in the selection of inhabitants, the population in Wesbank was and is very diverse: Wesbank houses people who lived in other townships in the Cape Town area (Khayelitsha, Mitchell’s Plain) and in the numerous informal settlements mushrooming around the city, as well as recent immigrants from the Eastern Cape Province and from further afield.

Figure 1.1 A typical scene near the main business hub in Wesbank, with signage in isiXhosa and English, informing the reader that there is a dentist’s surgery close by (Ugqirha Wamazinyo – Dentist)

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

To these two researchers, Wesbank is clearly a peripheral community with many social and economic problems, which are enhanced by its relative isolation from neighbouring communities. Regarding the type of housing provided, Blommaert et al. (2005: 4) state that the houses in Wesbank “are uniform and excessively simple in structure – people call them ‘matchbox houses’”. Houses are classified either as ‘simplex’ (one bedroom) or ‘duplex’ (two bedrooms).

Figure 1.2 A typical ‘simplex’ house in Wesbank

According to the Foundation for Contemporary Research (2002), the socio-economic profile of Wesbank is mainly caused by the fact that employed people living in the township tend to fall within low-income brackets. Low levels of education and a lack of work opportunities, caused by colonialism and apartheid, have resulted in huge skills deficits in this community. According to Moola (2002: 13), 14,4% of the population did not receive a formal education, while the 45% majority Coloured population only received education up to primary school level. Blommaert et al. (2005) report that only about 10% of the inhabitants finished grades 11-12 and this contributes to the high unemployment rate in the area. An effect of the high unemployment rate is that most of the residents in Wesbank make use of minibus taxis as it is the cheapest mode of public transport, especially to access stores, hospitals and work located in the more prosperous suburbs of Cape Town.

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A Society on the Move and a Township of Migrants

The following description summarises what Havenga (Metropole East Education Provision Plan, 2006) cited in Dyers (2009) have indicated regarding the demographic profile of Wesbank: Of a total population of approximately 29, 000 people, approximately 73% are mixedrace, mainly Afrikaans-speaking Coloured people, 25% are Xhosa people and a further 2% are White, Asian or foreigners from other parts of Africa such as Somalia, Nigeria and the Congo. The township consists of small housing units, a high school, three primary schools, a supermarket, a clinic, taxi rank adjoining an informal market, small house shops and a multipurpose centre.

Figure 1.3 A local government sign in Wesbank displaying the three official languages of the Western Cape Province: English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans

While some streets in Wesbank appear to house a fair mix of races, there is a concentration of Xhosa people in what is known as ‘Block E’ – a possible indication of racial and spatial segregation even in this township. In spite of such reminders of how races lived in separate areas during the apartheid regime, the schools in the township show more evidence of integration, especially Wesbank High. The first school built in Wesbank, Wesbank No. 1 Primary, also initially served as a community centre which was used by all groups for meetings and church gatherings. In recent years, this function has been replaced by the newly-built multipurpose centre, which together with the construction of churches and a clinic, are signs of further development in the Main Road. Another grim reality this loosely-knit community faces is the escalating gang violence in Wesbank, with competing gangs fighting for control of the lucrative drug market – particularly the trade in methamphetamines, more commonly known as Tik. This is one of a host of reasons why people speak nostalgically of (or in the case of older people, return to) their places of origin, or choose to move out of the

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

township when they can find housing and employment in other parts of the city. Thus far, as will be seen in Chapter 2, we have not come across anyone who happily embraces a ‘Wesbank identity’. The increasing gang activity has also affected the relative freedom with which we could enter the township to carry out our research. In the early years, we were given the understanding that Wesbank was safe to work in until 21h00 but currently even members of the South African Police Service warn us that gunfights between the gangs can take place at any time of day. The gang activities have therefore contributed to the marginalisation of this peripheral community, adding to what urban sociologist Loïc Wacquant (2008: 113) calls the “symbolic demonization of lower-class districts, which weakens them socially and marginalises them politically”.

Figure 1.4 Gang graffiti in Wesbank

Initial lessons learned while doing research in Wesbank Given its background, Wesbank was a very useful space for studies of the ways in which people are responding through their language practices to the intense socio-historical changes taking place in post-apartheid South Africa, as well as the challenges these pose for the provision of adequate education. The extended period of engagement with the community exposed our team to a number of assumptions regarding township research: in particular, that townships

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A Society on the Move and a Township of Migrants

are crime-ridden and dangerous places in which to conduct studies of any kind. Wacquant (2008:  113), who carried out ground-breaking research on the Black American ghettos and French working-class suburbs (banlieues), argues that such spaces (to which Wesbank bears a number of similarities) are “universally feared, stigmatised and denigrated by outsiders, including many scholars”. He further sees such spaces as being designed to hold the new urban poor who must cope with the “advanced marginality … spawned by the neoliberal revolution” (Wacquant, 2008: 115), particularly the massive unemployment rate which characterises this revolution among the working classes of the world. An assumption, arising from the apartheid era, is that there might be a simmering animosity between South Africans from different ethno-cultural backgrounds sharing the same space for the first time, and also between South Africans and foreigners from other African countries. Indeed, Wesbank has not escaped this bleak reality during times of high tension like political elections and the wave of xenophobic attacks on Black Africans which have continued to plague South Africa sporadically since 2008. Nevertheless, the early years of our research revealed a very hopeful population in Wesbank township – ordinary people trying to make an honest living, although plagued, even back then, by social ills such as emerging gangsterism, alcoholism, drug abuse and violence against women and children. As a team of researchers, we never encountered overt hostility or criminal acts, but instead were met by a great willingness on the part of many township dwellers to participate in discussions and interviews. We were given valuable advice on negotiating the space of Wesbank by the key community liaisons and some of our key informants, who advised us on the times when it was best to avoid the township. It was clear that the people wanted to be heard on a range of issues, and the discourses we collected often went much further than the research questions to which we sought answers. Chapter 9 juxtaposes our research interests and the promising post-1994 ideologies from which these interests arose, with some of the actual concerns and realities that beset the township dwellers. It is also mistaken to assume that township populations consist largely of people with limited education and future prospects, low levels of literacy and a high degree of dependence on the state. The reality is far more complex, as we encountered a wide range of educational qualifications in this area – from older people with hardly any form of formal education to those with tertiary qualifications. The issue of incomplete education was particularly apparent, with many reporting that they had not completed primary or secondary education, mainly due to poverty and the need to drop out of school in order to find work. As for limited future prospects, most people want a better life for themselves and their children, as the following written discourses from one of the research projects reveal (W=woman): W3: My begeerte is om te werk en my uie huis te kan hê en ek en my seun alleen kan bly. [My wish is to work and to get my own house so that my son and I can live alone].

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

W6: Ek wil graag ‘n goeie inkoms hê sodat ek onafhanglik van my man kan wees. ‘n Mens wil baie keer iets gaan koop dan moet jy maar los, want jy moet eers alles vra. [I would really like to have a good income so that I can be independent from my husband. Many times, you want to buy something but then you must rather leave it because you must ask for everything] (cited in Dyers et al., 2012: 8).

As South Africa is still very much a country in transition from its apartheid past, it was inevitable that race would also feature in our investigations, as can be seen from a study carried out by Barthus (2011). Her thesis, entitled Telling Tales of Identity: An Interpretation of Women’s Narratives, highlights the psychological and social differences between the two groups of women in her research (Coloured and Black), which she ascribes to the different social spaces they occupy in the township. She notes how a distinction is immediately made between ‘us’ (Xhosaspeaking Africans) and ‘them’ (Afrikaans-speaking Coloureds). The phrases ‘them’ and ‘these women’ were often used by the African women in reference to their Coloured peers (Barthus,  2011: 95). In other words, a definite distinction is made with regards to both race and language. The lack of integration between these two groups of women could be attributed to political tensions and leadership battles emanating from national and provincial election campaigns in the early years of the township’s existence, which played a significant role in Black people largely living in ‘Block E’, separated from the majority Coloured population. However, political tensions appear to have eased significantly since then, if measured against people’s concerns about issues like employment, crime and the education of their children. An issue faced by most sociolinguists doing township research in South Africa is that the population constantly shifts and changes, making longitudinal studies of the same groups of people very difficult. This demands flexibility and creativity on the part of the researcher, who needs to find people with similar linguistic and literacy profiles in order to validate initial findings. Another reality is that it is sometimes difficult to find male participants, as they are either less willing to participate in research projects than their female counterparts or leave the township during the day for formal or informal work in other parts of the city. Thus, our community-based projects (such as starting a vegetable garden or offering literacy classes) tended to attract far more female than male participants. In fact, three out of our five literacy research projects reflect female research populations only. Apart from conducting research into the (multi)literacies of the Wesbank population, we also investigated the multilingual repertoires of high school learners attending Wesbank High, starting with the Grade 8 pupils in 2004, and concluding with Grade 11 pupils in 2011. The choice of teenage learners was significant. As noted by Dyers (2008a: 116): Given that schools in peripheral communities frequently constitute a microcosm of the community itself, we believed these young people would largely reflect the linguistic identities of their families. They were also likely to be more responsive to the rapid societal changes in South Africa than older respondents. Their language use

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A Society on the Move and a Township of Migrants

and attitudes were also likely to be useful indicators of sociolinguistic phenomena like language shift, diglossia and codeswitching.

Although high school children are easier to access than adults for research purposes, this research population and the school as a site are far from unproblematic, as these reflect the socio-economic difficulties of the environment. During our research period, we had to contend with teachers going on strike for better pay and working conditions, overpopulated schools, behavioural issues, schools closing down at irregular times, as well as limited space in which to carry out the research. Teachers, themselves, were often absent for reasons such as living outside of the township or suffering from acute stress because they had to deal with pupils whose backgrounds were so different to their own. The need to follow strict ethical conventions and not to treat often vulnerable, marginalised people like mere guinea pigs were of utmost importance. It was also decided right from the outset that we needed to gain the trust and goodwill of the community through opportunities for training, short- to long-term employment and free meals. Aided by the principal of Wesbank High, Mr Christo van der Rheede, and the Iilwimi Centre for Multilingualism at UWC, we set up four community projects at the school, which included a vegetable garden, literacy, arts and crafts and needlework projects. Several community members were trained as project facilitators and received a small salary in turn for teaching their skills to community members who participated in the various projects. With funding supplied by a major national bank, a separate group of unemployed women were provided with training towards becoming qualified domestic workers in a joint project between the Iilwimi Centre and the Bergzicht Training Centre in Stellenbosch. Part of this project also involved placements with possible employers. Assistance of various types were also given to the schools which housed our projects. The research methodologies adopted The Wesbank research was largely ethno-methodological in nature, with researchers spending lengthy periods of time interacting with township residents. My personal engagement with the township started in 2003 through interactions with key informants who came to the university seeking our help, following newspaper reports of successful community projects in other parts of the province, led by the Iilwimi Centre for Multilingualism and the Language Professions at UWC. These key informants were invaluable to the research, as they helped us to gain the trust of the community, as well as the local leadership (which included the school principals). We built up a long-term relationship with them, and as a result, we were always able to count on their assistance when new projects were undertaken. The next stage was to work with groups of community members on community development projects based at the local high school, while at the same time carrying out research within this space on the culture, language and identities of the pupils

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

and their educators. From the relatively safe base of the school, the researchers then branched out into the township – onto the streets, into various spaces where people congregated like the Wesbank Multipurpose Centre, the local taxi rank, the supermarket and other stores, informal open-air markets and even into the homes of willing families. Research on individuals and the linguistic landscape of the township followed later. However, the various research components were all interlinked, with the encounters in the classroom closely related to the community projects and the participating parents supplying valuable insights into the sociolinguistic dynamics of their schoolgoing children’s lives. This gives credence to the call by Collins (2007: 4) for “the need for a multi-layered constructivist analysis capable of linking classroom encounters to ethnolinguistic dynamics operating across numerous social scales, including those of school, community, region and nation”. Community-based projects Higher Education Institutions regard their community-based projects as a critical component of student development, as well as fertile areas for researchers from different disciplines. Community projects have become a sub-disciplinary field of enquiry, given that so many of these projects have not been the successes that were initially envisaged in the period after South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994 – a time when donors were very willing to support worthwhile endeavours aimed at reducing the burden of poverty, especially among the country’s newly‑urbanised poor. A great advantage of working on projects in which research is ancillary to the objective of improving the living conditions of communities is that it allows researchers a great deal of informal, relaxed interaction with community members participating in the various projects, as was the case in Wesbank. For the sociolinguist working side by side with community members, this means that people’s actual language and literacy practices can be observed in an authentic manner. However, once data needed to be collected, the correct ethical procedures had to be followed, such as obtaining informed consent, ensuring anonymity, giving people the right to withdraw at any given time and have their data destroyed, and so forth. In addition, effective community-based research, as argued by Auerbach (2011, personal interview, 7 February), means to take the findings of one’s research back to the community and to evaluate their responses in accordance with the initial findings. The collection and analysis of the discourses produced by various research respondents in our community projects taught us a great deal about, among others, the language and literacy practices of such communities. As sociolinguists, we not only analysed what was communicated, but also how it was communicated – through speech, writing, signage, paralinguistic features, cultural artefacts, and so forth.

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A Society on the Move and a Township of Migrants

We therefore drew on discourse as “any meaningful symbolic behaviour” comprising of “all forms of meaningful semiotic human activity” (Blommaert, 2005: 2-3). In the context of the Wesbank community projects, the following sets of data as presented in Table 1.1 were collected: Table 1.1

Data collected through community projects in Wesbank

In-depth interviews with key informants on aspects of language, culture and literacy, which gave us valuable insights into their dominant language attitudes. Literacy surveys in the form of questionnaires and focus group interviews to determine the participants’ level of education. Surveys in the form of questionnaires and focus group interviews on people’s understanding of signage in the township. ‘Participant diaries’ (Jones, Martin-Jones, & Bhatt, 2000) completed by a group of women taking part in a training project. These women focused on both the cognitive and affective aspects of their course participation. Keeping a daily journal was one way in which they could be active, reflecting research participants instead of being passive research subjects. Jones et al. (2000: 319) note that: “the participant diary genre lends itself particularly well to the study of the action and interaction of people’s day to day lives and the ways in which spoken and written languages are intertwined in different types of literacy events”. Life histories, captured through recorded narrative interviews with individual women, as well as focus groups. Responses to the language policy of the province, captured via a questionnaire, discussions and individual interviews. Here the main areas of concern were the language practices or discourses in public places where provincial and local government officials were stationed (post offices, clinics, hospitals, banks, municipal offices, police stations, etc. in Wesbank).

As we wanted people to be as open and comfortable as possible, it was important that they communicated with us in their home languages. For this reason, we constantly drew on research assistants who could speak Afrikaans and isiXhosa, the two dominant languages of the township. Regrettably, this also meant that groups were often separated along ethnic lines, but this was unavoidable if authentic, honest responses were to be obtained. When the groups were brought together, English was the lingua franca, even though we discovered that many people, regardless of their ethnicity, spoke Afrikaans and isiXhosa. Apart from a statistical reworking of quantitative data like responses to questionnaires and a multimodal analysis of the Linguistic Landscape of the township, we largely drew on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Appraisal Theory to analyse the qualitative data such as the individual and group interviews, as well as the personal journals. Wodak (2001) argues that “the term CDA is used nowadays to refer

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

more specifically to the critical linguistic approach of scholars who find the larger discursive unit of text to be the basic unit of communication” and states that CDA is particularly concerned with the relations between language and power. What made it particularly relevant to our needs was Martin and Rose’s insistence (2007: 315) that there is a need for CDA to have a “complementary focus on community, taking into account how people get together and make room for themselves in the world in ways that redistribute power without necessarily struggling against it”. Specific attention was paid to whether aspects of a sharing of discourses and literacy resources for the purposes of empowerment could be detected through the process of identifying themes or patterns in the data. Appraisal Theory (White, 2000 and 2003; Martin & Rose, 2007) was used to identify the discourses and literacy resources in the transcribed interviews in a systematic manner. We attempted to identify recurring words, phrases and ideas enunciated by the participants to ascertain what these revealed about their sense of personal and collective power and agency or ability to affect change in their lives. Martin and Rose (2007: 25) argue that “Appraisal is concerned with evaluation – the kinds of attitudes that are negotiated in a text, the strength of the feelings involved and the ways in which values are sourced and readers aligned. Positionings or relationships are always occurring through a process of negotiation due to the interactive nature of discourse” (Martin & Rose, 2007: 26). It could, therefore, be said that discourse provides an indication or expression of attitude. There are three main ways in which attitude is expressed, viz affect, judgement and appreciation. Affect refers to the ways in which people express their feelings in discourse to indicate positive or negative feelings in a direct or implied manner (Martin & Rose, 2007: 29). Judgement, on the other hand, relates to evaluations of people’s character or behaviour. It can be expressed on a personal level to indicate either admiration or criticism or on a moral level to suggest praise or condemnation (Martin & Rose, 2007: 32). Appreciation can be identified by looking at the manner in which the value of things is construed through language (Martin  &  Rose, 2007:  37). In sum, Appraisal analysis helped us to uncover the recurrent discourses and attitudes among our respondents in terms of the key issues affecting their lives. The findings resulting from our application of the methods described in this section are discussed in chapters 2 to 6 of this book, where the focus is on our adult, and especially female, respondents. School-based research projects Our school-based research projects yielded a “complex and voluminous body of data representing different aspects of school identities and procedures and was complemented by an intense exposure to daily routines and to life in Wesbank”

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A Society on the Move and a Township of Migrants

(Blommaert et al., 2005: 384). My approach was to work closely with teachers, effectively functioning as a teaching assistant in both English Home Language and First Additional Language classes, in order to be able to set tasks for the pupils that would reveal their levels of proficiency, language attitudes and difficulties. I also made use of systematic classroom observations resulting in large amounts of field notes on language usage, patterns of classroom behaviour, teacher performance, the dynamics of group formation, and so forth (Dyers, 2004). The data sets collected are presented in Table 1.2: Table 1.2

School-based data

Questionnaires – for pupils, teachers and principal, inquiring about personal details, educational backgrounds and patterns of language use. Case-studies built on individual students (Dyers, 2008a & 2008b; 2009). In-depth interviews with the principal, a key informant teacher and (to a lesser degree) other teachers; Contextualised evidence of writing practices: ঋঋ Language mind-map – a graphic, star-like drawing in which pupils identified languages, domains and attitudes within their own repertoires; ঋঋ Quantitative tables based on these mind-maps, reflected as percentages; ঋঋ Free writing on the significance and importance of English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa to pupils; ঋঋ Creative writing, e.g. constructing a poem about their positive and negative characteristics; ঋঋ Writing assignments inquiring into the school histories of the pupils; ঋঋ Portfolios kept by pupils on a range of subjects (some of these pupils were selected for in‑depth interviews).

Working with pupils between the ages of 14 and 18 meant that strict ethical procedures had to be adhered to – with permission being obtained from the provincial education authority, the school governing body, their parents, teachers and the school principal. In terms of data analysis, we made use of statistical measures for the quantitative data and applied narrative, text- and discourse analysis to the qualitative data. Wesbank High, where our research took place, is a dual medium (Afrikaans and English) school, which also offers isiXhosa as a Home Language from Grade 8. During our research period, we learned that most Xhosa pupils chose isiXhosa as Home Language and English as their First Additional Language, but a small minority chose English as Home Language and Afrikaans as First Additional Language. This meant that pupils were either placed in English medium or Afrikaans medium classes, but staff shortages frequently led to both groups being taught in one class. The Xhosa pupils were usually placed in the English medium classes for subjects like Geography and Science.

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

Conclusion Set against the realities of late-modern migration patterns, this chapter provides a background to the studies on which this book is based. In particular, it introduces the township in question, as well as its population and the issues that impact this relatively young community. It shows how the overarching sociolinguistic project attempted to engage the community in various activities in order to build up strong working relationships for the research projects to be carried out successfully among adults and school children. The ethno-methodological approaches of the different community and school-based studies are also presented, together with particular ethical concerns.

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2

Language Maintenance and Translanguaging: The Impact of Migration in Wesbank

This chapter provides an analysis of the impact of migration on language and literacy practices in Wesbank. It commences with an examination of three principal factors likely to impact language usage patterns among recent migrants to the city of Cape Town – where people settle, continue links with rural heartlands or other places of origin and finally the schools selected by parents for their children. This is followed by an analysis of why a majority language like Afrikaans is being strongly maintained in this space. In addition, the chapter examines how a minority language like isiXhosa is increasingly modified, especially the deep rural variety of migrants from the Eastern Cape. Location and language: The influence of specific areas on these migrants’ language use The first factor likely to have an impact on the language use and attitudes of both translocal and transnational migrants, is the area in which their families settle. The issue of space and multilingualism has been investigated extensively by Blommaert  et  al. (2005a: 210), whose overarching interest lies in how “people are positioned and the communicative potential they display and have attributed to them in diverse, scale-sensitive situations and practices”. Their research has led them to conclude that multilingualism is not what people have, or don’t have, but rather what their environment enables or disables them to use. Different areas in Cape Town which have developed distinct linguistic profiles may therefore have different enabling and disabling effects on the language use of migrants. As a general rule of thumb, we can say that the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town are predominantly English-speaking, the Northern Suburbs Afrikaans-speaking (but with increasing signs of a greater use of English in middle-class households) and those areas characterised as Black townships tend to be predominantly isiXhosa-speaking. However, as in most modern urban settings, varying levels of multilingualism are present in all these areas. Different varieties and dialects of the languages as mentioned earlier and a number of languages spoken by other

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

translocal and transnational migrants – most notably South African languages like Sesotho and Setswana, and international languages like French, Lingala, Shona and Somali – occur within these settings. Where people live, whether by choice or forced by circumstances, may therefore eventually have a significant impact on their sociocultural identities. Certain suburbs of Cape Town have become home to large numbers of people from different African countries, e.g. Sea Point has many Congolese, Angolans prefer Woodstock, and Cameroonians have shown a preference for Maitland (Nchang, 2014). Naturally, the increasing superdiversity of Cape Town affects people’s language practices, with different varieties of English functioning as the main lingua franca – from the standard South African English variety used by, among others, teenagers and children schooled in former ‘Model C’ schools as demonstrated by their (mostly White) teachers, to the more informal, richly accented varieties used by a range of speakers, both local and international in origin. Further confirmation of the effects that the choice of area of settlement has on language use comes from Deumert, Inder and Maitra’s analysis of the South African census data on language use and ethnicity/race in the years 1996 and 2001 (Deumert, Inder & Maitra, 2005). Their analysis reveals differences in patterns of language shift within speech communities living in different parts of Cape Town. The social class and economic status of the area chosen by the migrants also play a crucial role. Middle-class migrants that occupy well-paying jobs, usually prefer to live in areas formerly reserved for other ethnic groups under the old apartheid dispensation. The tendency in this group is for children to attend English-medium or dual-medium schools (De Klerk, 2002), with the home language restricted to intimate domains. However, the situation is very different for the majority of Black and Coloured South Africans, who continue to live in townships on the periphery of major cities or in impoverished rural settings, financially dependent on subsistence farming or employment in agriculture, mining or related industries. The vast majority of Xhosa migrants settle in the Black townships of Cape Town, such as Langa, Gugulethu, Nyanga and Khayelitsha, in housing provided by the government or in large informal settlements known as squatter camps. According to Plüddemann, Braam, Broeder, Extra and October (2004: 19), “the majority of Xhosa speakers continue to live in impoverished ghettoes and remain marginalised from the mainstream economy, while a minority are assimilated on terms set by the dominant English-speaking elite”. In these settlements, they share a common home language, isiXhosa, and many of their cultural practices are maintained. They are also likely to draw on the support of informal social networks (Deumert et al., 2005: 316, 320) made up of earlier migrants, as well as Cape Town’s established Xhosa community, dating back to colonial times. The increase in the number of isiXhosa-speakers must contribute significantly to the close identification with the language and thereby to its continued vitality. In the Black townships, isiXhosa is particularly vital in domains like the home and places of worship, as well as in the performance

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Language Maintenance and Translanguaging

of cultural practices: “the home language is cherished as the sustainer of cultural and group cohesion and personal identity” (Wright, 2004: 176). However, some of these migrants have also settled in more recently established townships open to all races, like Wesbank and the neighbouring Delft, which are areas with a diversity of ethnicities, cultures and languages. With reference to the distribution of Coloured, predominantly Afrikaans-speaking people in the greater Cape Town area, Van Der Merwe and Van der Merwe (2006: 68) state: “The spatial distribution of Afrikaans speakers is heavily concentrated in three wards, namely Blue Downs, Mitchells Plain and the Cape Town ward, where 56% of the city’s Afrikaans population was accommodated”. Wesbank forms part of the Blue Downs ward of Cape Town. These wards, with their distinctive linguistic, religious and social identities, house people from the working and lower middle classes who share many socio-cultural networks. Continued links with the rural heartland While important aspects such as culture, tradition and language may differ, Cape Town’s township inhabitants have many negative issues in common: high unemployment rates, excessive crime rates, insufficient schools and other public amenities, to name only a few. Township life therefore frequently poses severe challenges to aspects such as family cohesion, parental control and the exercise of traditional practices and values. These urban problems can turn the rural heartland into an idealised place with which the migrants still strongly identify. Many of the teenage respondents we interviewed indicated that they did not feel a strong association with the urban township. Most of the Xhosa teenagers mentioned particular villages from which they originally migrated, and this pattern was also reflected in the responses of the Coloured teenagers, as the following excerpt from a focus group interview reveals: Interviewer:

Wat sal jy sê, waar kom jy vandaan? S, sal jy begin vir my? [What would you say, where do you come from? S, will you begin for me?]

Respondent 1 (S): Ek sal sê ek kom van Sutherland af, want ek is daar gebore. [I would say I come from Sutherland, because I was born there.] Interviewer:

Sutherland, OK. Jy sê nie jy’s van Wesbank af nie? [Sutherland, OK. You don’t say you are from Wesbank?]

Respondent 1 (S): Hmm-mm [Negative] Interviewer:

Jy voel nie of jy van Wesbank is nie? [You don’t feel you are from Wesbank?]

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

Respondent 1 (S): (shy laugh) Ek voel nie ek is van Wesbank af, want ek is meer gelukkig om te sê – [I don’t feel that I am from Wesbank, because I am happier to say –] Interviewer:

Jy’s meer trots op Sutherland? [You are prouder of Sutherland?]

Respondent 1 (S): Mmm [Affirmative] Interviewer:

Interessant. M, waar sal jy sê kom jy vandaan? [Interesting. M, where would you say you come from?]

Respondent 2 (M): Ek sal sê ek kom van Kraaifontein. [I would say I come from Kraaifontein.] Interviewer:

Ja, daar’s baie mense van Kraaifontein wat hierso in Wesbank bly, ne? Het jy nog baie familie daar, M, in Kraafontein? [Yes, there’s lots of people from Kraaifontein living here in Wesbank, hey? Do you have lots of family there, M, in Kraaifontein?]

Respondent 2 (M): Mmm [Affirmative] The first respondent still strongly identifies with her place of birth – the rural, predominantly Afrikaans-speaking town of Sutherland, while the second respondent prefers to say that she comes from Kraaifontein, a town quite close to Wesbank, adding that she still has strong family ties there. This pattern was repeated with most of our respondents, who all hoped to eventually move out of the township. When the space you are forced to live in does not enhance your sense of personal identity, you instinctively look for other, more positive markers of identity. One of these is likely to be your home language, as can be seen from the following interview extracts: Interviewer:

Nou wat is die belangrikste taal vir jou? [Now, what is the most important language for you?]

Respondent 1 (S): My – my huistaal is vir my belangrik. Is Afrikaans. Meeste vannie tyd, en met meeste vannie mense wat ek ontmoet, praat ek Afrikaans. [My home language is important to me. It’s Afrikaans. Most of the time, and with most people I meet, I speak Afrikaans.] Respondent 2 (M): My moedertaal is Afrikaans, en ek was gebore daarmee. En ek sal meer Afrikaans praat as anner taal. [My mother tongue is Afrikaans, and I was born with it. And I shall speak more Afrikaans than any other language.]

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Language Maintenance and Translanguaging

Respondent 3 (A): Ek sal sê Engels en Afrikaans, want by my huis, waar ons nou Afrikaans praat, maar tussenin onse familie is Engelse mense, so ek sal Engels en Afrikaans gebruik. [I would say English and Afrikaans, because at my home, where we mainly speak Afrikaans, there are also English relatives, so I would use English and Afrikaans] We note here that Afrikaans is referred to as ‘my home language’, ‘my mother tongue’, ‘the language I was born with’ and the language that is spoken ‘most of the time’. For these respondents, the language still has considerable vitality in their new space, which enables them to use Afrikaans, and to some degree, English. The following narrative is based on one of the individual interviews conducted:

J is 15 and in Grade 10, attending Wesbank High. His Afrikaans-speaking family moved to Wesbank from Eerste Rivier, another large township close by, when the bank foreclosed on their mortgage. His father completed Grade 11 of high school, and speaks good English. He assists J with his homework. His mother completed Grade  6, and was the one who decided that everyone in the family would speak Afrikaans. Because of the family’s poverty, his one sister is being raised by his maternal grandmother. He expresses no love for English (Ek voellie om Engels te praatie’.) and regards himself as an ‘Afrikaanse Kaapenaar’. Although he has English-speaking cousins on his father’s side, these cousins do not visit J’s family, whom they regard as ‘too poor’. His mother originally came from Tulbagh, a predominantly Afrikaans rural town in the Western Cape. He visits his maternal grandmother and the rest of his mother’s family in Atlantis, a large West coast town created to house Coloured workers in the previous dispensation. He regards the Afrikaans spoken in Wesbank as being inferior to his own Afrikaans. He has a few Xhosa friends, and is keen to learn isiXhosa. When he and his Xhosa friends are together, they speak a mixture of Afrikaans and Xhosa. He does not go to church, despite his mother’s efforts. The church his mother attends uses Afrikaans and (very occasionally) English. He admits to struggling in English, and ranks it below Afrikaans and Xhosa. In J’s family, Afrikaans is the dominant language, but he regards the varieties spoken in Wesbank as inferior and less pure to that spoken by his family, which originated in the rural areas from which his parents migrated. Interestingly, J ranks isiXhosa higher than English – a language which he clearly resents and finds difficult to succeed in at school. His better-off cousins, who are English-speaking, appear to look down on his family, which contributes to his negative attitude towards English. However, he seems to have picked up some isiXhosa from his Xhosa peers in Wesbank and is keen to learn the language because of its association with his friends. Most recent Xhosa migrants to Cape Town retain very strong links with their rural heartland, and travel back there during the Easter and Christmas holidays or for

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

important family events such as funerals or weddings. These enduring links must, in some way, contribute to the continuing vitality of their home language, isiXhosa, as a significant marker of group and individual identity. According to Grossman (2014: 163), “a strong sense of ethnocultural identity can, and frequently does, survive a range of pressures to bend, to disappear, to be suppressed or censored or to become an auxiliary feature of identity formation”. There is very little evidence of assimilationist behaviour in the Xhosa community of Wesbank, and the people proudly continue to enact their cultural traditions in this shared space. Both adult and teenage Xhosa respondents in our study believed rural isiXhosa to be the ‘deeper’ and ‘purer’ variety, as opposed to the ‘light’ urban variety. Despite this attitude, the rural variety already shows signs of being modified as a result of the regular visits of city dwellers to the rural heartland. Adolescents and teenagers, in particular, are attracted to the urban slang spoken by city youngsters, whom they respectfully call amajoin – people (ama in isiXhosa) who ‘join’ or link the city with the rural areas. It was interesting to learn from older members of the community that amajoin was not always a term of respect, but was used to label those who dropped out of school in rural areas and were then forced to go to the cities to make a living. Evidently, there has been a shift in meaning across generations, especially among the young whose families intend moving to the city. Once these children arrive in the city, they already have some knowledge of the urban varieties, and use it in preference to the rural varieties in order not to be marked as ibharu (someone backwards, a ‘country bumpkin’ in isiXhosa). They tend to use the rural variety only when in conversation with elders as a sign of respect, or when performing certain cultural practices. Our findings have shown is that even though the urban isiXhosa vernacular is rapidly making inroads into the rural varieties, particularly among the youth, positive attitudes towards the rural varieties persist. It also continues to be celebrated in poetry, prose and other cultural forms, but not to the same extent as the urban varieties are celebrated in popular culture. The impact of the school attended by the children The third factor influencing language use and attitudes, particularly in the case of Xhosa pupils, is the school their parents or guardians select for them. In 2004, a third of all the isiXhosa-speaking pupils in the Western Cape were enrolled in schools that were previously reserved for other races, and this number is increasing (Plüddemann  et al., 2004). Given that township schools are often overcrowded, have less qualified staff and fewer resources, many parents are opting to send their children out of the townships to the best schools they can afford, with a clear preference for English‑medium schools. The newly integrated schools in Cape Town largely use English and/or Afrikaans as mediums of instruction. Some, like Wesbank High, offer isiXhosa as a first or additional language, but many Xhosa pupils end up

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in English‑medium classes for the majority of their subjects, owing to staff shortages and a lack of resources. At Wesbank High, one-third of the pupils speak isiXhosa as their home language. Most of them learn isiXhosa as their first language and English as their second language, while a minority choose English as a first and Afrikaans as a second language. It is only in Cape Town’s Black township schools that most of the education still takes place in isiXhosa, but even here, all final examinations (with the exception of isiXhosa Home Language) have to be written in English. There are of course historical reasons for the neglect of South Africa’s indigenous languages as media of instruction. Although the indigenous Black languages enjoyed some status in the so-called ‘Black homelands’, the language policy of the apartheid regime recognised only two official state languages – English and Afrikaans. As Webb (1996: 176) puts it, “Officially, the government of the RSA had no responsibility for the use or the promotion of any other South African language”. The various ethnic groups were expected to preserve their respective languages at the universities established by the regime for each separate group, which never actually happened. This made Afrikaans and English the sole languages of power in South Africa, “that is the languages through which people gain access to educational development, economic opportunities, political participation and social mobility” (Webb, 1996: 176). In post‑apartheid South Africa, despite a policy of 11 official languages, Afrikaans still has a significant presence, but the real language of power is English. Many Black South African parents are happy for their children to be educated only in English, which can be ascribed to historical reasons. Referring to this condition as the Static Maintenance Syndrome, Alexander (2004: 121) states: “… the vast majority of Black people simply do not believe that their languages can or should be used for higher-order functions even though they cherish them and are completely committed to maintaining them in the primary spheres of the family, the community and the church”.

Kamwangamalu (2004: 140) concurs that “those who can afford it, and among them policy-makers themselves, send their children to schools where the medium of instruction is English”. These parents who are products of the Bantu Education Act of 1953 themselves, recall having received poor education in their home language, which did little to equip them for the demands of the modern work market. They see English as a guarantee of upward social mobility and the key to good employment, in a country with 36,1% unemployment in 2015 (www.fin24.com). It is highly unlikely that such entrenched attitudes will change, despite the fact that obtaining a good education in English is an unattainable dream for the majority. Despite the democratic ideal of multilingualism, the period since 1994 has been marked by “a very real increase in the dominance of English in social, economic, political and educational spheres” (Reagan, 2004: 108). This dominance is also apparent in the

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almost overwhelmingly positive attitudes towards English by the respondents in our study. A further major complication with the implementation of the current national language policy is the often broad differences between urban vernaculars and the standardised indigenous languages taught at school. As Makoni and Pennycook (2007: 27), citing Makoni (1998), state: the widespread use of urban speech forms that are ontologically inconsistent with notions of languages as ‘hermetically sealed units’ (Makoni, 1998) … challenge existing dominant ideologies that constrain official policies, particularly in South Africa.

It is these urban speech forms that dominate popular culture in South Africa – in TV soap operas, music, poetry and even community newspapers – and the gap between them and the standard forms continues to grow. Ultimately, this disjuncture between reality and what is taught strengthens the position of English as the most important language of education in the country. Migration and language maintenance: The case of Afrikaans in Wesbank Afrikaans has suffered historically because of its association with apartheid when it became known as ‘the language of the oppressor’. However, it is also a language that has a very close association with Coloured South Africans, most of whom resides in the Western Cape Province, where 49,7% reported Afrikaans as their home language during the 2011 South African Population Census (Statistics South Africa, 2011). The Coloured population also displays varying degrees of bi- or multilingualism in Afrikaans, English and other languages like isiXhosa, along a continuum from ‘mainly Afrikaans’ in some spaces to ‘a mixture of English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa in particular domains, to ‘mainly English’ in others. Other languages that play smaller roles within this group are Arabic (particularly in the Muslim community) and German (which was a popular school subject in the previous dispensation). However, the shift towards English as noted in studies by Malan (1996), Anthonissen and George (2003) and Warner (2008) is clearly a middle-class phenomenon. The children of such families are typically educated at English-medium schools, and despite strong exposure to Afrikaans in the family and community environment, tend to use mainly English in conversation with others. It is indisputable that Coloured South Africans contributed to the development of Afrikaans from the Dutch and German spoken by the first European colonists, who arrived in South Africa in 1652. Many members of this group are descendants of South Africa’s original inhabitants, the San and Khoi-khoi as well as tribes from Asia and other parts of Africa, who were brought to South Africa as political prisoners and slaves by the European settlers. Cape Dutch (later Afrikaans) developed out of

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the need to facilitate communication between these extremely diverse linguistic and ethnic groups (Malan, 1996: 127). Language plays an important role in defining who we are and makes us instantly recognisable to other members of our particular community of practice. As Joseph (2006: 39) puts it, “we read the identity of people with whom we come into contact based on very subtle features of behaviour, among which those of language are particularly central”. For Titus (2008), Afrikaans remains a key component of the ethnolinguistic identity of the Coloured community that, owing to the socio-political history of South Africa, sets them apart from Afrikaners. Unlike the latter group, they have never displayed the same “emotional investment in keeping the language pure” (McCormick, 1989: 206). Nevertheless, the majority identify closely with the variety of Afrikaans which they use every day, regarded by McCormick (2000), Malan (1996) and others as a mixed code, which incorporates many English loanwords. As one young member of the Wesbank community noted while commenting on the differences between standard Afrikaans and what the community in fact speaks: Respondent 3

(A): Os praatie yntlik regte Afrikaans nie. Os praat Kaapse Afrikaans, Engels en Afrikaans deu’mekaa. [We don’t actually speak proper Afrikaans. We speak Cape Afrikaans, a mixture of English and Afrikaans.]

According to Hendricks (personal communication, 2006), it would be more accurate to use the term Kaaps (reportedly first used by the writer Adam Small) to refer to this mixed variety, instead of the more commonly used Cape Flats Afrikaans, as Kaaps also includes a sub-set of varieties. These variants will display varying degrees of code-mixing with English as one travels from the centre of Cape Town to its suburbs, peripheral townships and surrounding rural areas. The linguistic convergence of English and Afrikaans, in Cape Town and other parts of South Africa, is visible in the local varieties of both languages (McCormick, 1995: 203). In addition, location, education and role models all have a part to play in the varieties of Afrikaans spoken by Coloured people all around South Africa, and a number of studies have been done on these different varieties (e.g. Combrink, 1978; Webb, 1989; Roberge, 1995; Hendricks, 1996; Hendricks & Dyers, 2016). The following is an example of the spontaneous, unmarked conversational code‑mixing used by some Wesbank inhabitants: Respondent 1

(S): Well … met my ma is ek meer relaxing, like ek en my ma praat, ek sal my ma alles vertel. [Well … I’m more relaxed with my mother. When my mother and I chat, I will tell her everything].

Further evidence of the close identification with Kaaps is provided by the strong attachment of many members of the Coloured community to the poetry, plays and

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music which use this variety. Examples include the poetry and plays of Adam Small, Peter Snyders and others, the music of rap and hip-hop artists like Brasse vannie Kaap and Prophets of da City, and the success of theatrical productions like Joe Barber (Petersen, Isaacs & Reisenhöfer, 1999) and Suip! (Petersen & Reisenhöfer,1999). As Stone (1995: 280) notes, “the dialect is beloved by its speakers as the sacramental marker of communal membership and as a vehicle of intimacy and love”. While its speakers acknowledge its low status in relation to standard Afrikaans, it is fair to say that it enjoys a certain eminence, as well as strong vitality in especially the Cape Flats areas surrounding Cape Town, to which a substantial number of Coloured people were forcibly relocated at the height of the apartheid regime. The factors contributing to the maintenance of Afrikaans in Wesbank A common definition of language shift is that it takes place when the younger members of a minority speech community no longer speak the language of their parents but speak a dominant majority language instead. The language is, therefore, not passed on to the next generation. Conversely, language maintenance occurs when a language continues to be used across all generations despite the presence of other languages – or what Fishman (1972) refers to as ‘stable diglossia’. According to Myers-Scotton (2006: 89), two generalisations may be drawn from studies on language shift and maintenance, namely: ঋঋ There is ‘always a combination of factors at work’ supporting either shift or maintenance; and ঋঋ In a bilingual community, patterns of maintenance and shift can be measured on a continuum with some individuals using only the home language (L1) at one end and others using only the second language (L2) at the other end. In intergenerational shift, for example, we might find the older members of a family using the L1 (but having some competence in the L2), while the children, despite having an almost perfect comprehension of the L1, speak only the L2. In addition, Myers-Scotton (2006: 90) lists the following societal, in-group and individual factors as being central to language maintenance: ঋঋ Demographic factors – large numbers of speakers of the same L1 living together; ঋঋ Occupational factors – working with fellow speakers of the L1, with restrictive socio-economic mobility; ঋঋ Educational factors – e.g. official provision of the L1 as a medium of instruction; ঋঋ Social networks and group attitudes about the L1 as an ethnic symbol; and ঋঋ Psychological attachment to the L1 for self-identity. The above-mentioned factors are to a large extent present in the Wesbank Coloured community. There are, however, different Afrikaans communities of practice in this space, each with their own way of speaking, acting and believing in terms of language

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(Lanza, 2007), depending on the place of origin from which they migrated to Wesbank. Nevertheless, these different groupings have no difficulty in communicating in Afrikaans with one another, and the common practice is to accommodate the subtle varietal differences by using standard Afrikaans. The township schools all offer Afrikaans as Home Language and as one of the official mediums of instruction (the other being English, mainly to support the large numbers of Xhosa pupils). In most of the churches in the township, Afrikaans also plays a leading role, although a switch to English may occur when speakers of other languages are present. Poverty, unemployment and low levels of literacy further restrict the socio-economic mobility of this community, thereby contributing to the linguistic status quo. As a particular space organising people’s linguistic choices, the township appears to play an enabling role in the maintenance of Afrikaans. It is perhaps the main marker of a ‘Cape Coloured’ identity (constructed as this identity may be to some), particularly in the absence of a clear group culture and identity (Dyers, 2004: 31), given their diversity of origin. This was borne out by the attitudinal data on Afrikaans, collected over a period of four years in the township, which revealed a psychological attachment to the language for self- as well as group identity, thereby confirming the findings of Titus (2008) regarding the importance of Afrikaans in defining the identity of Coloured people in the Western Cape. From rural to urban codes: Migration and isiXhosa In Wesbank, the urban vernacular spoken by its Xhosa residents shows increasing signs of code-mixing with Afrikaans and English, as well as in the local slang spoken by the youth. This is evident in the following school playground conversation among Grade 11 pupils, captured during school-based research in 2011. All the speakers in this conversation have lived in Wesbank for a period of three to six years. Note that the words or syllables in italics are either Afrikaans or isiXhosa. Interviewer:

Ek sê (Afrikaans for ‘I say’) bafobethu! Molweni ni alright? [Hi guys, how are you?]

Female learners (FLs): Si alright unjani wena? [We are fine and how are you?] Interviewer:

Ndi alright na … ibe nababhuti? [I am also fine … are you with these guys?]

Female learners (FLs): Sibe nabo. [Yes we are]. Interviewer:

Otherwise ku grand bafobethu? [Anyway, are you all right guys?]

Male learner 1:

Ku grand akhoneks (neks adapted from the Afrikaans word ‘niks’, meaning ‘nothing’) [Fine no problem].

Interviewer:

I-grand le plek (plek Afrikaans for ‘place’) for uncokola? [Is this a suitable place for us to chat?]

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

Male learner 2:

Yhaa! (Afrikaans slang for ‘yes’) I-grand. [Yes! It is a good place].

These ethnic Xhosas teenagers have clearly appropriated words and phrases from both English and Afrikaans, making them active agents who use the different linguistic resources available to them in their environment. The conversation is an example of what is often referred to as Tsotsitaal or even Flaaitaal. Loosely translated as the language (‘taal’ in Afrikaans) of gangsters (‘tsotsis’ in isiXhosa and isiZulu), or the language of city slickers (‘flaai’ slang for ‘slick’ or ‘cool’) – a social dialect based on borrowings from other languages like Afrikaans. It is used mainly, but no longer exclusively, by males as a form of group solidarity (Makhudu, 1995: 298). Teenagers avoid using such codes at home, where parents still frown on its use. Instead, it is spoken in informal social spaces in Wesbank (Dyers, 2009). For Makoni and Meinhof (2004), urban vernaculars like Tsotsitaal can be construed as “a creative adaptation to new contexts” and the above conversation is an example of adaptation to an environment where Afrikaans, and to a lesser extent English, are the dominant languages. I would argue that while young Xhosa people seem to regard any heavily code-mixed variety of conversational isiXhosa as Tsotsitaal, it is more correct to use the term Flaaitaal, the language of city slickers. In Wesbank, we found young Xhosa females also using this code-mixed variety and there is evidence that it is spreading to young Afrikaans-speaking males as well (Dyers, 2009). Therefore, it is certainly not only the preserve of young people from subordinated or marginal groups. While the effects of translocation can be seen in young people’s oral performances, further evidence can be found in their writing. The following unedited examples (from a total sample of 90 short pieces of writing) reveal the impact of migration on the written work of Grade 8 pupils, ages 14 to 16. At the same time, it reveals their intensely close personal identification with isiXhosa. The three samples, produced by pupils ranging from those new to Cape Town to those who had been here for up to four years, at the time that the data was collected, clearly reveal a rapid shift to the urban variety, with subsequent loss of rural isiXhosa makers such as certain idiomatic phrases, concordial agreement and the oversimplification of word order. Written sample 1:

IsiXhosa sabalulekile kubantubamaXhosa ngo xasisenza amasiko siye sithethe isiXhosa sethu esisifumana emabeleni oomamabethu, xasithe tha ezilwimi ziminzi abazali bethu abakhulu abasiva. [isiXhosa is important to the people of the Xhosa because our isiXhosa we get from the breast of our mothers. When we are speaking these many languages the ancestors do not hear us]. This was written by a pupil new to Cape Town. She makes use of deep rural isiXhosa sentence formation and idiomatic expressions like emabeleni (from the breast).

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Language Maintenance and Translanguaging

This reveals her intensely close identification with isiXhosa and her belief that communication with her ancestors is only possible through this language. Written sample 2:

IsiXhosa sibdulekile ngukuba ekhaya sisebenzisa sona kunye nasecaweni sisebensisaso and isiXhosa ndisincanebeleni linamawam. [isiXhosa is important because it is our home language and we use it at church as well]. This pupil has been in Cape Town for at least a year. His language use is beginning to show evidence of code-switching (note the use of ‘and’), and there are errors in spelling and grammar, particularly at the level of concord. Written sample 3:

IsiXhosa sibaluleke ngokuba Umntu wesiXhosa asazi ngoba awonukwazi ukuba uthi ungumXhosa phakathi kwabanye abaXhosa ube uthetha elinye ilwimi luhlazo kutho oko. [You can’t be an isiXhosa person among the other isiXhosa speakers if you speak another language, that will be a disgrace]. This pupil has been in Cape Town for approximately four years. There is evidence of concord errors as well as the abbreviation of the negative form. The standard word order has also been dramatically simplified with certain prefixes simply being omitted. These samples indicate not only the influence of the urban vernacular on these pupils’ writing and grammar but also the absence of sustained formal language learning in isiXhosa, which was not yet being offered at Wesbank High at the time. If the above pupils attended school in a predominantly isiXhosa-speaking township, their writing might have been less influenced by the urban vernacular, but that is by no means guaranteed. Much depends on the levels of literacy in the home, the teachers’ isiXhosa proficiency and the often wide-ranging differences between the various rural dialects, the urban vernacular and the official, standard variety taught at schools. More evidence of transidiomatic shifts and blendings can be seen in the following two case studies. Narrative One:

L is a Grade 10 pupil, at Wesbank High. He arrived in the Western Cape in 2005. His mother, a matriculant, works as a security guard. L said that he uses isiXhosa in his dreams and when speaking to himself. IsiXhosa predominates at home, but he feels comfortable using English and tsotsitaal (mixed with some Afrikaans) with his Xhosa and Coloured friends. But he may not use any Afrikaans in front of his mother,

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

because she doesn’t like the language. Although isiXhosa is the dominant language at his church, he reports that Afrikaans and English are also used to accommodate non-isiXhosa speaking congregants. “Around Wesbank most of the time me and my friends we use tsotsitaal, but when there is somebody who does not understand tsotsitaal we switch to English because I do not understand Afrikaans. When we are at home with my friends we use isiXhosa or English because my mother doesn’t like tsotsitaal at all. When we are socializing with girlfriends we use isiXhosa. With my friends’ parents if they speak Afrikaans we use English, but if they speak isiXhosa we use it.” Narrative Two:

A, another Grade 10 pupil, arrived in the Western Cape in 2003. Her parents both completed high school. Her father works as a security guard. A reports using isiXhosa when talking to herself, but “with my family of eight people, we mix all three languages – English, Afrikaans and Xhosa. My father is the one who speaks Afrikaans more than the rest of us”. At the shops in Wesbank, she uses English. She also uses English in her interaction with Coloured friends, but “… some Afrikaans gets mixed in as well”. At the Assembly of God church her family attends, English is the dominant language, although some hymns are in isiXhosa. Although isiXhosa is clearly the main language for both respondents, Afrikaans and English are present in interactions with friends, at places of worship and when doing shopping. The use of Afrikaans also seems to increases with the time spent in Wesbank, as the pupil who arrived in 2003 appeared quite comfortable with the language, while the one who arrived in 2005 still used English to interact with Afrikaans-speakers. It may, of course, be true that they already had some exposure to Afrikaans before arriving in the Western Cape, and that their passive knowledge of the language has now been activated by the enabling environment. It is also significant that A’s father (likely the main breadwinner) is the one who has the greatest command of Afrikaans in his family – an indication of the importance of the language in the employment market of Cape Town. Conclusion Language shift and loss are, according to May (2005), always part of a broader pattern of economic dispersion and social shifts. It is therefore likely that the continued migration from rural areas to cities currently underway in South Africa will strongly affect people’s patterns of language use and attitudes. This chapter has offered a consideration of the influence of the location people live in as a key factor in shaping language use and attitudes among migrants from rural areas. It has also demonstrated that continued links with the rural heartland reinforced attitudes of respect for the rural variety as being the ‘ideal’. Notwithstanding this respectful attitude, the rural variety is, in fact, increasingly threatened by the urban varieties brought to rural areas by city dwellers. In addition, the school chosen by parents for

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their children plays a determining role in the language choices made by individuals and families. The chapter has also unpacked a number of factors contributing to the maintenance of Afrikaans in the space of Wesbank: its dominant role as the home language of the majority population; its use in key domains of language usage in the township; a powerful sentimental attachment to the language as a signifier of individual and group identity; and the socio-spatial marginalisation of the community, which coupled with a lack of allegiance to this space, leads to a closer identification with language as a marker of identity. The generalisations that can be drawn from this are as follow: Firstly, even in the presence of a powerful language of wider communication like English, people continue to identify strongly with their home languages, especially when it enhances their personal and group identities or is a symbol of their ethnolinguistic distinctiveness. Secondly, even when a particular variety has a perceived low status, it remains a powerful index of micro-networks, in-group identity and the possible exclusion of those who do not speak this variety. Finally, as will be shown in Chapter 7, the choice of language or variety in intimate domains explains in part why home languages continue to remain vital despite the use of languages of higher status in other domains. Factors like space, poverty and social class all appear to favour language maintenance rather than language shift. Among the Xhosa pupils, we found that young rural migrants definitely learned more English, but that it was somewhat compromised by their attendance of a township school in a predominantly Afrikaans-speaking township. The latter fact also led to them acquiring a lot of informal Afrikaans through friendship ties, even though Afrikaans was seldom used in the home. The transition to the urban variety of isiXhosa, with the subsequent loss of ‘deep rural’ isiXhosa, occurred very rapidly and was in fact already underway in the rural heartland. It remains to be seen whether the loss of rural isiXhosa as an objective marker of ethno-cultural identity will provoke movements towards its revitalisation in the Xhosa community. The research findings reported on in this chapter support Deumert et al.’s (2005) localised case study research which indicated that settlement in different parts of a city, like Cape Town, leads to marginal, yet growing, tendencies for language shift among migrants from the Eastern Cape. The shift to the urban vernacular from the rural variety of isiXhosa is clearly demonstrated in the language practices of the young respondents, and in the increasing use of English and Afrikaans in the environment of Wesbank. The chapter also offers further support for theories on the enabling and disabling effects of space on language (Blommaert et al., 2005a). Most importantly, it offers more evidence that the mixing and blending of languages taking place among young migrants in a multicultural urban setting, can help to bridge the gap between groups that were formerly housed in separate areas due to historical and political reasons.

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2

3

Literacy, Language and Ideologies flowing into Wesbank

The concept of multilingual literacies has emerged from “the gradual intermeshing of the New Literacy Studies (NLS) research tradition with critical sociolinguistic and ethnographic research into multilingualism in the 1990s” (Martin-Jones, in Juffermans  et al., 2014: x) signalled by moving away from “communities as homogeneous and spatially defined entities” as well as “long dominant ideologies about language and national identity” (Martin-Jones, ibid.: xi). Part Two, therefore, shows how the heterogeneous Wesbank community exhibits its multilingual literacies, coupled with the transportation of particular language attitudes and ideologies tied to their existing and developing literacy resources. Introduction Can we not see the ways that literacy arises out of local, particular, situated human interactions while also seeing how it regularly arrives from other places – infiltrating, disjointing and displacing local life? (Brandt & Clinton, 2002: 343).

The above quotation taken from Brandt and Clinton (2002) is an effective encapsulation of the notion of portable, multilingual literacies with their associated communicative codes and underlying attitudes and ideologies as they present in late-modern societies. The different migratory trajectories of the township dwellers in Wesbank mean that they reach this space with a range of literacies, skills, language practices and attitudes towards particular languages and varieties. These attitudes, in turn, are anchored in ideologies about language typical not only of a post-apartheid South African society, but also of a post-colonial Africa in an ongoing state of flux and movement – particularly towards perceived ‘safe spaces’ where housing, healthcare and employment are more likely to be found. It is important to see this book as fitting into the paradigm of the sociolinguistics of mobility, rather than distribution (Blommaert, 2010; Pennycook, 2007; Jacquemet, 2005). The sociolinguistics of mobility acknowledges the fact that the latemodern world is characterised by globalisation and a greater mobility of people – in both physical and virtual spaces – than at any time in human history. In contrast, the sociolinguistics of distribution sees communities still living in homogenous, clearly

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

defined spaces with restricted mobility, and in which their language practices can be defined by the presence of one or more community language. In the context of a township inhabited by migrants, and characterised by a flow of people, linguistic and literacy resources, as well as discourses and particular attitudes and ideologies regarding language, constantly influence and modify such spaces. Although the work on literacy in this book fits into the “newly recast critical sociolinguistics of multilingualism and multilingual literacy … better attuned to the conditions of late modernity” (Martin-Jones, in Juffermans et al. 2014: xi), it is important to acknowledge the foundational New Literacy Studies (NLS) movement in our research. The NLS explores what it means to think of literacy as a social practice rather than the mere acquisition of reading and writing skills (Gee, 1990; Street, 1985, 1995; Cameron-Smith, 2004). These studies recognise the existence of multiple literacies that vary and are contested according to time and space and in relations of power. They typically problematise what counts as literacy at any time and place and question whose literacies are dominant, marginalised or resistant (Street 2003: 77). According to Quinn (1999: 22), “this approach to literacy shows an understanding of the nature of knowledge, reality, language and texts not as something ‘out there’ but rather as constructed or created socially”. This chapter offers a broad overview of the literacies, language practices and language attitudes and ideologies people brought, and continue to bring, to the township. It is based on research regarding language attitudes and ideologies carried out at Wesbank High in the early years of the project, combined with the findings from two adult literacy and skills surveys that took place in 2003 and 2007. In 2003, working in collaboration with a multi-sector committee from the community, houseto-house research was conducted on the levels of literacy and available skills in Wesbank’s Main Road. This exercise was repeated in 2007, but this time focussing on three of the more impoverished streets of the township. Senior pupils from the high school and two primary schools in Wesbank also collected data from their homes, by interviewing their parents and other adults under the guidance of the research team. These surveys and early school-based research (Dyers, 2004) confirmed (as noted in chapters 1 and 2) that different varieties of Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa dominate the communicative spaces of Wesbank. The majority Coloured population speaks particular varieties of Afrikaans and some English, while the Xhosa inhabitants speak varieties of isiXhosa and English and to some extent informal Afrikaans. Several of the adults in our surveys expressed positive views on the ease with which their children were picking up each other’s languages, an aspect clearly demonstrated by the findings in chapters 2 and 7. These parents commented that multilingualism is an advantage in the new South Africa, and might improve their children’s ability to find work.

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Literacy, Language and Ideologies flowing into Wesbank

Literacies in Wesbank: From particular skills to text-based literacies In Wesbank, as in other townships in Cape Town, literacy means different things to different people depending on their level of education. While conducting our surveys, we found many people with incomplete education – some who could not read and write, and others with only basic skills in these two areas. Interestingly, there was also an ethnic dimension to the community’s literacy and educational levels, with the minority Xhosa population having proportionately more matriculants than the Coloured population. I venture the argument, that there is a clear link between better education and greater mobility, as higher education levels afford migrants better access to all channels of information regarding available housing, schools and possible employment. It was also interesting to discover that the best-educated people in Wesbank lived either on or very close to the Main Road with its transport links, shops and schools – possibly another indication of the power of a better education creating social and spatial stratification even in a space like this township. In the second survey carried out in 2007, we focused on three streets forming the outer perimeter of Wesbank which seemed to prove our initial finding that those who were more impoverished and less educated lived outside the main centre of commerce and education. Here, the parents’ level of education was significantly lower than that of their children. Most of the parents surveyed had only completed primary school or a few years thereof. This had been achieved in some of the feeder towns for the Wesbank community – rural villages and towns like Robertson, Piketberg, Upington, Grabouw and some Boland and West Coast towns like Paarl and Hopefield, which may indicate that many of these adults had initially worked and lived on farms. In a few instances, parents had made it to high school but dropped out in Grade 9, which is a very common drop-out stage in South Africa. The older children had made it to high school, with some even completing matric. All the younger children were at school, with only a few exceptions where parents complained that they were forced by poverty to keep some of their children at home. Some of the children attended schools outside of the township due to overcrowding in Wesbank schools or due to the reservations their parents had about the quality of education in Wesbank. In terms of reading and general engagement with texts, many of Wesbank’s inhabitants showed an interest in reading for leisure but regarded books and newspapers as ‘a luxury’. The few who could afford to, read newspapers like the Afrikaans dailies – Die Son (The Sun) and Die Burger (The Citizen). They also borrowed books from one another or read the newspaper wrappings in which their groceries and other goods were wrapped, or old newspapers brought home from places of employment. These were some of the comments made by the research participants, indicating a real hunger for reading material: Die naaste biblioteek gaan hulle R6 uit die sak jaag, so lees ons enigiets wat ons in die hande kan kry. [The nearest library would cost R6 to join, so we read anything we can lay our hands on.]

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

Magazines wat ons van die werk af bring as die Boere klaar gelees is. [Magazines we bring from work when the White people have finished reading them.]. Die Bybel of die advertertensies en kennisgewings wat opgeplak word. [The Bible or the advertisements and notices that are put up.].

When the question was asked how they coped with filling in official forms or reading municipal letters, those who could not read or write, especially the senior citizens, reported that they sought help from friends or relatives who had some skills, including their better-educated children. Some expressed an interest in attending Adult Literacy classes, but others felt that they were simply too old to learn. Those who attended the Adult Literacy classes, initiated as one of our four community projects, felt that it was worth their time and effort. This was particularly evident in the case of those who had no previous schooling. A housewife proudly demonstrated her new-found ability to write her own name, while a school caretaker was grateful to finally receive some form of education. The Adult Literacy classes were also open to school pupils with reading difficulties. Teaching included doing basic maths and being read to by their teachers. The patient teacher who attended to these pupils was an isiXhosa first language speaker, but owing to the composition of the classes, taught them in Afrikaans – a language she had learned at school and during her training as a pre-primary school teacher. As a result of the training we provided, she was encouraged to attend part-time classes in Adult Learning at the University of the Western Cape. She is one of our success stories from this community, who responded positively to our projects by improving her qualifications. However, for others, accessing educational channels to develop existing skills was far more challenging. The surveys revealed that while people migrated to Wesbank with a range of skills, which in some cases could be described as multimodal literacies (which is described fully in Chapter 4), their ability to develop these existing skills were rendered almost impossible by the large-scale unemployment affecting the community, particularly young people, even those with matriculation certificates. While unemployed women were keen to participate in our community projects, the men were more reluctant, as they were looking for real jobs. The township appeared to have a number of workers from the building trade (welders, masons, carpenters, etc.) who could either not find work or lacked the necessary finances to start their own small businesses. They also did not know where to start and demonstrated a sense of inferiority which was hard to overcome. Those who had attempted to start their own business were often forced to stop because the community could not adequately support them. Despite all these restrictions, it was heartening to discover that many of the people participating in our projects had found employment since we began our engagement with the community. It seems that the time they had invested in learning certain skills from us (particularly those we trained as project facilitators), has given them some degree of confidence and agency that enabled them to find work. One of the

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Literacy, Language and Ideologies flowing into Wesbank

women who participated in our needlework classes also offered her services as a volunteer on a feeding scheme at a primary school, while her husband who had participated in the vegetable gardening project, was employed at a gardening service. A project facilitator on the Arts and Crafts project found work as a cashier at a petrol station. Most of the community members who joined the projects expressed a desire to study further in professions like social work, nursing and teaching. Different communicative codes and their ideological positioning in this space In Wesbank one hears different communicative codes being practised, such as different varieties of Afrikaans, English, isiXhosa and other languages. When high school pupils were asked to write about the relative importance of each language, the results showed that for both Afrikaans and Xhosa pupils, English as an index of spatial and social mobility, had the highest instrumental value, although loyalty to the individual mother tongues still remained (Dyers, 2004; 2006). The initial data gave little evidence that these pupils regarded each other’s respective mother tongues as having any great intrinsic value in their lives. However, the minority Xhosa pupils appeared to be more inclined towards code-switching between English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans as the need arose. This may indicate an awareness of how limited communication in the community would be if they spoke only isiXhosa, given that Afrikaans is a majority language not only in Wesbank but also in the Western Cape. The following is a writing sample by a Grade 8 Xhosa pupil, who expressed herself on the importance of Afrikaans, using very interesting phonetic spelling and sentence construction that reveal the extent of her literacy skills in this language: Afrikaans is bye balakrag van klom mense is hulle werk gan soek en die vrou of man wat jy sam met hom prat dan moet jy Afrikanse prat van hulle kan Xhosa praat nie en jy kan English prat nie dan kan jy jour Afrikanse praat.

In standard Afrikaans, this would read: Afrikaans is baie belangrik, want baie mense as hulle werk gaan soek, het dit nodig om te kan praat met mense. Hierdie mense kan nie Xhosa praat nie, en jy kan nie Engels praat nie. Dan kan jy jou Afrikaans praat. [Afrikaans is very important because a lot of people, when they go and look for work, need it to communicate with people. These people cannot speak Xhosa and you cannot speak English. Then you can speak your Afrikaans]. Despite the many deviations from standard Afrikaans, the pupil manages to communicate her message and reveals a competence in written Afrikaans that barely any of the Coloured pupils would have been able to display in isiXhosa. The value attached to Afrikaans by this pupil is an indication of the way in which space (in this case Wesbank and the Western Cape Province) co-constructs language ideologies and the more personal manifestations of these ideologies, viz. attitudes. Dyers and Abongdia (2010: 132) point out what the relationship between language attitudes and

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language ideologies is, when they note that “behind every set of language attitudes is a fairly coherent language ideology rooted in the socio-political and historical environment of particular communities.” Therefore, the attitude towards Afrikaans captured in the above example is a natural result flowing from the historical and socio-political background of the Western Cape Province. Several varieties of Afrikaans can be found in Wesbank, ranging from the (relatively unblended Orange River Afrikaans spoken by recent arrivals from the West Coast and Northern Cape mining towns), to the richly idiomatic Afrikaans from some Karoo towns, to informal Boland Afrikaans spoken by people from towns like Paarl and Stellenbosch, and finally to Kaaps.The variety of Afrikaans acknowledged as the one most used by the Coloured people of the Western Cape, particularly in and around the city of Cape Town, is Cape Vernacular Afrikaans, or Kaaps (Dyers, 2008b: 52‑53). Although predominantly using informal Afrikaans as matrix language, Kaaps is also marked by regular code-mixing with English and other languages like isiXhosa, as well as particular lexical, phonological and idiomatic features. This can be seen in the following example of a sentence in standard Afrikaans and its equivalent in Kaaps: Wanneer laas was jy in Kaapstad vir inkopies? (Standard Afrikaans) Wanne’ laas was djy innie Kaap vi’ shopping? (Kaaps) [When was the last time you went to Cape Town to do some shopping?]

Informal regional varieties of English, enriched with the idioms and accents of the regions people have migrated from, can also be heard on the streets of Wesbank and serve as the official lingua franca between foreign traders and Wesbank inhabitants, as well as between different ethnolinguistic groupings such as the predominantly Afrikaans and isiXhosa-speaking groups. In this way English which dominates in business and much of public life in South Africa (Casale & Posel, 2010: 58), has become “embedded in local practices” (Pennycook, 2007: 87) in Wesbank. However, as can be seen in Chapter 8, a different set of norms is applied to the use of English in this community when compared to how it is used outside the township, particularly in more elite spaces. As much as high levels of English proficiency may be viewed as desirable here and in the rest of South Africa, most people in Wesbank (particularly those who are predominantly Afrikaans-speaking) acknowledge that attaining a high standard of English proficiency seems, in the words of Alexander (2000) ‘unassailable, but unattainable’. In our surveys, we also picked up an underlying negativity towards people who spoke ‘posh’ English – as if they somehow did not fit into the socio-economic profile of the township and belonged elsewhere with this elite social capital (Bourdieu, 1991). The different varieties of isiXhosa spoken here have already been discussed in detail in Chapter 2. As was noted, we discovered that older people in particular felt torn between the social capital represented by urban isiXhosa, and the sense of pride and identity signalled by the use of the deep rural varieties, which were

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still proudly displayed in particular cultural rituals. It was clear, however, that these latter varieties are used far less than blended urban isiXhosa, which appears to signal modernity and urban sophistication for many, despite being frowned upon by certain cultural custodians. The so-called Tsotsitaal spoken in Wesbank also varies depending on the youth groupings making use of it and the audiences that are present. It is sometimes performed with as much blending of different communicative resources (translanguaging) and slang as the groups care to exhibit, for example, in hip-hop performances, gang rituals and sometimes just predominantly urban isiXhosa displaying borrowings from Afrikaans and English, such as in the following extract from an interview with a Grade 10 pupil: Ndihlala no mama osebenza as a security at Khulani in Cape Town. [I live with my mother who works as a security guard at Khulani in Cape Town.]

Here part of the pupil’s response is in English, and it is interesting to note that he appears to be unable or unwilling to conjure up the isiXhosa needed for ‘security guard’ or ‘Cape Town’. Yet, the more intimate part of the sentence, referring to where and with whom he lives, is in isiXhosa. Finally, there are the languages that foreign traders speak among themselves, which are Lingala, French, Somali and some Nigerian dialects. These traders use informal English to communicate with the locals and have, in a range of different ways, managed to pick up some Afrikaans and isiXhosa. Despite their adherence to English as lingua franca, they have come to understand that their businesses can only flourish if they are able to speak bits of the local languages, which they have managed to pick up from their customers, friends or from South Africans with whom they enjoy intimate relationships such as wives and girlfriends, as well as from lengthy periods of exposure to these codes. Nchang’s (2014) research among African traders in Cape Town has shown that many of them are adopting hybrid language practices, using isiXhosa expressions, English and pidgin forms of their national languages in order to improve their communication with South Africans. She also noted the use of isiXhosa terms like bhuti (brother), sisi (sister) and gogo (grandmother), being used by these traders even when addressing fellow nationals, as well as modifications to their pronunciation of English words in order to sound more like Black South Africans. She sees this as the active modification of linguistic identities in an attempt to blend in with the South African natives more easily, possibly as a result of the xenophobic attacks on Black migrants from other African countries. Of particular interest in this space are the blended varieties emerging from sustained language contact – the ways in which children and teenagers in particular are mixing and blending their languages to create new urban codes, known as translanguaging (Lytra & Jørgensen, 2008). This concept, also called languaging) is defined as “sets of

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linguistic resources … afforded for language users in different social and cultural circumstances” (Pietikäinen et al., 2008: 81), or how people use their language resources to make and transmit meaning and enact identities (Blackledge & Creese, 2010: 554). Naturally, in a space like Wesbank both adults and the youth are constantly exposed to different communicative codes via the media (soap operas, advertisements jingles, etc.), the multilingual linguistic landscape, listening to church choirs, the calls of the hawkers advertising their goods, to name a few. Our observations and interviews revealed a number of reasons for the translanguaging practices of high school students. The most basic reason is that it is a ‘fun thing’ to do. Young people generally show great aptitude for using new forms of expression and playing with language, reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s insistence that “language games are a form of life” and at the heart of the social construction of meaning (Wittgenstein, 1988, cited in Williams, 2010: 161). Experimenting with language is something the young people of Wesbank also appear to enjoy as they try out new words and expressions – especially clicks in isiXhosa, slang and swear words in Afrikaans, pidgin from Nigeria and Cameroon, and so forth. As Pennycook (2007: 8) asserts, “language is a product of social action, not a tool to be used”. It also makes practical sense when a speaker wants to be understood by a group consisting of speakers of different languages. The research team working at Wesbank High observed groups of pupils preparing for a school concert, and immediately noticed that the pupils who were directing the rehearsal of the various items were shouting instructions in a mixture of English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa, which (accompanied by gestures and movements) were clearly understood by everyone and required no additional translation. This example supports the view of Canagarajah and Wurr (2011: 6) that the languages of multilinguals “complement one another and the traces of one language on the other are creative, enabling, and offer possibilities for voice”. Despite some of the racial tensions that persist between the older Coloured and Xhosa inhabitants, many youngsters have formed friendships across the racial divide and spend a significant amount of their time together, both in and outside of school. Naturally, this leads to the sharing of linguistic resources – whatever works and slips easily into communicative practices and sounds cool – which over time become part of their normal communication and may even penetrate the home environment. A few teenagers said that they made it a priority to pick up as much of each other’s languages out of the suspicion and fear of being gossiped about, cheated on or becoming a possible target of bullies and gangsters. Only rarely did the ideology of South Africa as the multilingual, multicultural ‘rainbow nation’ get a mention as a reason for learning a different language.

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Conclusion This chapter attempted to capture the rich tapestry of codes, literacies and related skills which people migrating from one area to another have brought into the space of Wesbank. How people draw on these mobile semiotic resources are often dependent on their language attitudes and ideologies, as shown in the hostility towards languages like Afrikaans and isiXhosa by the older generation. However, young people appear to be far more open to acquiring whatever linguistic resources they encounter as a result of making friends across ethnolinguistic barriers. This must surely be a promising development for community and nation-building despite remaining ethnolinguistic tensions. The chapter has also shown that people with limited education are quite resourceful in finding help when it is necessary for them to interact with demanding texts like municipal forms. Nevertheless, those with better education displayed greater mobility in terms of being able to access particular resources like jobs and houses.

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4

Portable Multiliteracies: Theory and Practice in Wesbank

Introduction The focus of this chapter is on a group of women in Wesbank, with specific reference to the literacies they brought with them to the township, which enable them to survive and, in some cases, flourish here. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Report of 2011, South Africa has a literacy rate of 88% which puts the country at number 113 on the world literacy ranking list. It lags behind some of Africa’s most troubled economies like Zimbabwe, which has 91,9% literacy rate and is ranked at number 95 in the world. The report further notes that 70% of South Africans have no qualifications at all. In addition, the gendered challenges of incomplete education are glaringly obvious, with older women being particularly marginalised. Aitchison and Harley (2006: 99) note the concerning growth in the number of functionally illiterate women according to the 2001 Census of South Africa (Statistics South Africa, 2001): “In 2001, men represented 40% of the unschooled, women 60%”. South Africa’s struggling and often dysfunctional state education system has a very poor reputation, and in terms of mathematics and science school education, the country has the second lowest ranking internationally. It is clear that the educational resources of the state cannot meet everyone’s needs. The state has tried to broaden the impact of its Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET), but the programme has been beset with difficulties. One of these difficulties, as pointed out by Prinsloo (1999: 420), is “the attempt to enculturate an underclass of adults into standardised literacy is unlikely to deliver on the expectations that the ‘basic skills’ paradigm assumes”. Citing Prinsloo and Breier (1996), he further emphasises the value of the informal processes of literacy use and acquisition in non-school contexts, as well as the processes of ‘apprenticeship learning’ in everyday situations. Given the inherent difficulties in accessing state-sponsored literacy programmes, how do ordinary women with incomplete or no formal education negotiate different forms of literacy in an urban environment like Wesbank in order for them to truly become active, participatory citizens in the new South Africa? This chapter takes a

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closer look at the acquisition and enhancement of basic literacies through the sharing of portable, multiliteracy resources. These include people’s existing multiliteracies, imported aspects of the linguistic landscape of an area using signs produced elsewhere, and mobile literacies (acquired through mobile messaging/texting). Portable literacies refer those multiliteracies people have acquired either formally or informally, and which they bring with them as they migrate to new spaces. Through collective sharing and activation, these multiliteracies are passed on, giving them particular strategies for negotiating these new spaces (Dyers & Slemming, 2014: 322). For women, much of their informal literacy acquisition takes place through daily socialisation in real and virtual space with peers, as well as younger people, particularly as most people in South Africa have access to at least one mobile telephone (called cellphones in South Africa). This was confirmed by a study by Porter and others (Porter, 2011) which showed that mobile or cellphone ownership is high even in lowincome areas. Even in remote rural areas, according to this study, up to 43% of people own cellphones, and this figure rises to 67,5% in urban areas. The women in the study on which this chapter is based had migrated to Wesbank from other areas in and around Cape Town such as Kuils River, Eerste River, Scotsdene in Kraaifontein, Stellenbosch and the Cape Flats areas of Kensington, Kalksteenfontein, Mitchell’s Plain and Delft. They also came from towns and rural settlements in other parts of the Western Cape Province, like Vredendal and Lamberts Bay on the West Coast, as well as from other provinces like the Northern Cape and the Eastern Cape. Some of the women in the interviews indicated that they had moved several times before coming to live in Wesbank, and most of them had moved to be near family members. We elicited responses through narrative interviews with our key informants and, as a follow-up, through focus group sessions by means of semi-structured interviews. In the initial stages of the fieldwork component of this research, we spent some time talking to our key informants about the aims of this research and found them willing to share their life stories. They also enabled us to make contact with the three groups of women who participated in the focus group interviews: a group attending literacy classes at the Adult Education Centre housed at the local high school, a group of senior citizens meeting at the Wesbank Multipurpose Centre and a prayer group meeting weekly in different houses. The women’s ages ranged from those in their early thirties to senior citizens, and they were all practising Christians. As already noted, key informants and literacy mediators played a central role in gaining access to these women. The interviews were all conducted in Afrikaans as it was the dominant language spoken by the research participants. Some of the women from the Eastern Cape could also understand, but not speak, isiXhosa.

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Literacies and voice in the sociolinguistics of mobility The sociolinguistics of mobility (Blommaert, 2010) reminds us that never before in history have people moved across the world on the scale that we are currently witnessing. “Mobility is something that has spatial as well as temporal features and mobile text is text that has the capacity to travel through time and space (Blommaert,  2010: 24). In South Africa, more than 60% of all people now live in cities, and these cities are struggling to cope with the massive demand for housing and other major services. As noted previously, Cape Town is becoming increasingly diverse in terms of its population and linguistic resources. If people are more mobile, then so are the literacy resources they bring with them. The work of the New Literacy Scholars (Gee, 1990; Street, 1995, 2003) also influenced our thinking about portable literacies. These scholars contend that literacy is a socially constructed practice and not something ‘out there’. They also recognise the existence of multiple literacies that vary and are contested according to time and space, as well as in relation to power. In his introduction to a special issue on Ethnographies of Literacy, Baynham (2004) refers to three generations of literacy studies – the earlier work which focuses on the orientations to literacy pedagogy, the second generation which falls in a period highlighting the importance of multimodality, and the third generation which looks at ethnographic studies of ‘out-of-school’ literacies by e.g. Masny (2005) and Gregory, Long and Volk (2004). In a recent ‘third generation’ study done in rural Botswana, Macheng (2011) draws the interesting conclusion that people without schooling “can mobilise local forms of knowledge and resources and thereby accomplish the literacy-linked tasks that are part of their lives”, and that stereotypes such as ‘literates’ and ‘illiterates’ are inaccurate and far too narrow to capture the actual strategies people use to deal with ‘literacy events’ (Street, 2001). Hernandez-Zamora (2010: 55) agrees: “a little schooling can be overcome by a strong sense of agency developed through social participation and the appropriation of powerful out-of-school discourses”. One of the most significant out-of-school discourses is texting – the sending and receiving of messages via mobile telephones. Thurlow and Poff (2013) see the defining feature of texting as the sociable function of such messages, particularly in their discursive content and communicative intent, adhering to conversational norms rather than a more prescriptive form of written communication. This sociable function implies that texting is a resemiotisation of spoken discourse – an adaptation from oral code to written code. Iedema (2003: 48) defines resemiotisation as “how meaning makes shifts from context to context, from practice to practice, or from one stage of a practice to the next”. As a new form of meaning-making, texting is clearly “less restricted when it comes to orthography and language choice” (Lexander, 2011: 14).

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The women in the study on which this chapter is based all migrated to Wesbank with varying levels of education and types of literacies, or to use a term which more accurately captures our understanding of what these women brought with them in terms of literacy – multiliteracies (Slemming 2010; Dyers & Slemming, 2014). Mills  (2011: 96), who stresses the plurality of literacy resulting from “multiple, competing discourses and identities in multicultural societies”, argues that “a multiliteracies approach acknowledges the multiple ways of communicating for different cultural and institutional purposes”. Thus, some of the women in the study may rely extensively on their oral and visual literacies, while the text-based literacies of others reveal their various levels of exposure to formal and even informal education. What was, however, important to the women in Wesbank’s multicultural space was to find avenues for sharing their particular multiliteracies with others, while at the same time benefiting from the skills and discourses of those various groupings and individuals with whom they shared their literacies. Through their membership of the different groups identified in the study, they entered into beneficial relationships where both schooled, and out-of-school literacies aided their individual development. This is the type of learning which Lave and Wenger (1991) call ‘situated learning’ – through which people participate with others to attain productive societal practices that benefit both themselves and their community. A multiliteracies approach is also in line with the multimodal approaches to literacy of both Kress (2000) and Kenner (2004), especially in the harnessing of a range of sensory and physical modes in making sense of the different forms of text our respondents were exposed to, e.g. the linguistic landscape of the township, official documentation, the schoolwork of their children and their educational endeavours, mobile messaging, agendas of meetings and informal notes or letters, communication with schools, and so on. In any study with previously marginalised members of a society, such as ours, it is also important to take into account the concept of voice. Giroux’s (1988: 199) argument that voice, in the context of a critical theory of education, is an indication of how individuals affirm their own class, cultural, racial and gender identities is worth noting here. Also of importance is Spivak’s (1993) ‘subaltern’s view’ – as most of these women’s voices were effectively silenced in written, as well as orally narrated texts during apartheid. According to Blommaert (2005: 69), the “capacity to accomplish functions of linguistic resources translocally, across different physical and social spaces” is a more accurate description of voice in this era of globalisation. It is this form of strategic competence (Starfield, 2004) that can activate collective potential. For this to happen, voice has to transcend modalities, moving from multimodality to transmodality, “as a way of thinking about language use as located within multiple modes of semiotic diffusion” (Pennycook, 2007: 44). In line with Gee’s attempt (1990: 3) to define literacy by first explaining what discourse is and Mills’ argument that a theory of discourses is central to multiliteracies (2011: 96), our analysis of the women’s different discourses led to an understanding

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of their multiliteracies and the transportation of these literacies. As a social practice, literacy is mediated by language and other cultural tools and artefacts when social actors both position and are positioned by sign-based exchanges (Prinsloo  &  Stein,  2004:  69). In addition, our reliance on the different discourses of our respondents was also strongly influenced by the key principles adopted by Kenner (2004) and Gregory et al. (2004) regarding multilingual literacy practices in homes and communities: the recognition that culture and cognition create each other and that a joint culture creation is crucial for learning; giving a voice to those whose voices go unheard; and acknowledging the role of important mediators of language and literacy in different contexts. It can also be argued that finding a way into the world of text, via portable mulitliteracies within an informal supportive environment, is a vital component in helping the women in our study to exercise their rights as participatory citizens. For a newly democratised country such as South Africa, the notion of participatory citizenship is of great importance, as it relates to the societal structures (of family, community, local government, etc.) that people need to negotiate actively in order to become full participatory citizens (Stroud, 2009; Sutton, 2008). Schinkel (2008: 10) defines citizenship as “the modern, democratic form of political membership”, and people with incomplete education often find it very difficult to exercise such membership and to negotiate the essential societal structures. They are often the most marginalised members of society and are relegated to second-class positions instead of being seen as first class, active citizens, thus there are definite links between citizenship and literacy. Shor (1999: 1) sees literacies as “social action through language use that develops us as agents inside a larger culture” while Bamgbose (2000) contends that language is central to active citizenship and participative democracy. In addition, Stroud (2007) argues for the acceptance of the notion of linguistic citizenship, which pertains particularly to the role of language and multilingualism as a political resource. A theory of portable literacies The dialogue presented here in the setting of a particular space in Wesbank township illustrates our understanding of the concept of portable literacies: It is a crisp winter morning in Wesbank Township, Cape Town. At the local multipurpose centre, a group of senior citizens are completing a form that will assist them in accessing financial assistance from the Social Welfare Agency. Two women with no formal schooling – Stienie and Willemina - are using a friend Cecilia (real names withheld) to complete their forms while they prepare lunch for the group in the centre’s kitchen, which adjoins the room in which the seniors meet regularly. There is a constant dialogue between Cecilia, who is sitting at the kitchen table and the two women as Cecilia tries to complete their forms. The following excerpt is one of their exchanges:

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Cecilia:

Dit sê hier julle moet sê waar julle gebore is. [It says here you must give your place of birth].

Stienie:

Williston.

Willemina:

Ceres.

Cecilia

Oe jete, hoe spel ‘n mens Williston nou weer? [Oh dear, how does one spell Williston?]

(writing, mumbling):

(She receives assistance from Maggie, another member of the group, who spells out the word using the English alphabet). Cecilia:

Dankie, Maggie. Hoe lank is antie Stienie nou al op pension? [Thanks, Maggie. How long have you been on pension, Aunty Stienie?]

Stienie:

Hoe lank nou al … mm … mm … ek dink siewe jaar. [How long … I think seven years].

In the excerpt above we see different literacies at work – Cecilia’s schooled ability to help her friends, while in turn being assisted with spelling by Maggie. At the same time, Stienie and Willemina are able to interpret the questions on the form as read out by Cecilia and to provide the correct answers. They are also using their knowledge and skill of cooking to prepare a meal for the group. If literacies are portable, then they are also detached from a resource base – the individual with mastery of particular multiliteracies, either formally or informally acquired, becomes the resource base and as the individual migrates, these knowledge and skills accompany him/her. If an opportunity arises where these skills are needed or recognised, the individual then has the power to pass it on to someone else. Even if it is never exploited in its existing form, it can act as a platform for new forms of learning, e.g. the person with financial literacy may find it easier to acquire numeracy skills, while the person with strong literacies of the self may gain a lot from certain media forms like soap operas. The point is that no one comes to these potential teaching and learning situations with nothing – everyone has acquired some form of learning somewhere, and while this may have no formal base, it has allowed them to survive in the world of text and to find ways of negotiating life. This puts quite a positive spin on the skills people bring with them, but the key aspect of portable literacies is that they work best when shared. People must be agentive enough to join community groupings where an assortment of such literacies can extend their own. This, of course, makes highly diverse communities a potentially rich source of intercultural educational exchange. Women whose particular circumstances do not allow for them to socialise with others are therefore deprived of these informal learning encounters that could help them to thrive in the township.

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Examples of portable multiliteracies identified in Wesbank We identified the following as portable literacies because they have the potential to empower if shared and are able to be transferred from one geographical space to another, either from the women’s previous living spaces to their current living space in Wesbank or between different spaces in the township. For each type of literacy, we provide an example of the way in which it is being applied in the tasks performed by our research participants. Multimodal literacies Multimodal literacies exist in combination. It refers to the simultaneous use of a combination of two or more literacy modes, e.g. visual, oral, computer, schooled or one of the other types of literacy mentioned below to indicate an applied level of functional literacy. Unsworth (2008: 3) argues that it should be acknowledged that information communication technologies (ICTs) are affecting the very nature of literacy texts themselves, not only making communication possible in new ways but also making it possible to create new meanings: “there seems to be broad agreement that literacy can no longer be thought of as involving language alone and that images, in paper media texts, and also sound movement and gesture in digital multimedia texts, need to be considered along with language as fundamental meaning-making resources in constructing texts.” (Unsworth, 2008: 3) For example, in the Senior Citizens’ Organisation, we observed the combined application of organisational management literacy, religious/pastoral literacy, community navigational literacy and literacies of the self in the context of a needlework event the group participated in. A good example could be seen in the chairperson of the Senior Citizens’ Organisation, who indicated that she had acquired her love for sewing by observing her mother at work when she was a child. Even with her limited level of formal schooling, these skills enabled her to find work in a clothing factory. The following comment, were made by the women regarding their multimodal literacies: Clothing sewing: Ek ken al die basics, want ek het in Ackermans gewerk. Ek sal graag meer oor naaldwerk en patrone wil leer. [Clothing sewing: I know all the basics, because I worked in Ackermans (a local chain store). I would like to learn more about needlework and patterns though.]

Huishoudkunde, iets wat te doen het met kosmaak. Ek het al vir ‘n begrafnis gebak en so klein “parties”, maar ek wil nog kennis opdoen. [Domestic Science has something to do with cooking. I have baked for a funeral and some small parties, but I want to learn more.]

The chairperson of the Senior Citizens’ Organisation also introduced members to ways in which empty coffee cans, bottles and paper holders can be re-used in the

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production of embroidered or crochéted items that can be displayed or even sold. In the process, she was able to experiment creatively and teach others how to create their own hand-drawn designs, making something new out of things that would ordinarily be thrown away. She spoke with great pride of the group’s desire to sell their crafts: Ons beoog om ‘n stalletjie te hou waar ons dit gaan uitstal … al die handewerke van die bejaardes en … dan beoog ons regtig dat die gemeenskap vir ons as bejaardes daarin moet ondersteun … deur die goeters te koop. [We aim to have a stall where we can exhibit all the crafts of the seniors and then we truly aim for the community to support us as seniors by buying the items.]

Financial literacies in combination with visual and computer literacy One of the key informants in the study, a successful businesswoman who was unable to read independently, complained that people who are illiterate struggle to find work. What was interesting in her comment was that she did not recognise her own level of financial literacy or the fact that she possibly had to rely on more than a functional level of visual or self-literacy in order to function in her capacity as a businesswoman. Another respondent served as Treasurer of the Adult Education Centre governing body based at Wesbank High. She had a Senior Certificate, i.e. a schooled level of literacy, which included competence in computer literacy. This combined with her budgeting and finance management skills in the home sphere were applied in her role as Treasurer on the governing body. She stated that: Ek is die treasurer by die aandskool. Ek deal met die finansies. Soms, naweke, dan is ek besig op die computer … omdat die finansiële verslag, elke derde maand moet dit in. [I am the treasurer at the night school. I deal with the finances. Sometimes, weekends, then I am busy on the computer … because the financial report, every third month, it must go in.]

Community navigational literacies There were indications that some of the female participants, especially the older women and those who acted as our key informants were particularly confident with ways in which the community could work together more effectively. They suggested that there should be a greater appreciation for how they could benefit by learning from one another in an intergenerational way. The Chairperson of the Senior Citizens’ Organisation expressed appreciation for working with the elderly: Hulle leer vir my en ek leer vir hulle en dit is hoekom ons is nie te klein om nie te leer nie en hulle is nie te groot om ook te leer van die jonger persoon nie. [They teach me and I teach them and that is why we are not too small not to learn and they are not too old also to learn from the younger person.]

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Portable Multiliteracies: Theory and Practice in Wesbank

Literacies of the self Literacies of the self can, within the context of our study, be interpreted in two ways – the ability to speak and even write about yourself and your needs with confidence in order to access possible avenues of assistance, or to speak about any successes you may have achieved in life without feeling that this will be seen as being boastful. For example, one of the key informants, Aunt T, demonstrated a high level of self-literacy by saying: En op my eie het ek die huisie gekoop. Ek het ‘n lening aangegaan en … ek is nou op die huidige oomblik besig om aan te bou. Dit gaan maar baie moeilik, maar ek gaan deurdruk. Dit is nou wie ek is. [And on my own I bought this little house. I made a loan and … the house is now under construction. It is quite difficult but I will persevere. That is just who I am now.]

She also mentioned buying a small car that she was paying off monthly. These are indications of agency and her ability to create conditions that suited the lifestyle and comforts she wanted. Her sense of independence also encouraged a developing literacy of the self in a younger woman, who commented: … dit is mense soos Aunt T wat vir jou as vrou eindelik die courage gee om daai ekstra myl te gaan met iemand anders … [It is people like Aunt T who eventually give you as a woman the courage to go that extra mile with someone else.]

Religious literacies Religious literacy was prominently applied in two contexts, viz the Senior Citizens’ Organisation and the prayer group. Of crucial importance to our research participants were the links between the Christian faith and their personal experiences. As a member of the prayer group noted: Na die gebede relax ons net, ons praat ‘n bietjie oor die Bybel, ons praat oor dinge wat ons kwel, en dan kyk ons wat ons kan doen … om dinge bietjie bietere te maak. [After the prayers we relax, we talk a little about the Bible, we talk about the things that bother us, and then we see what we can do … to improve things a little.]

The related discourses about offering supportive ethos and pastoral care to the broader community through committed practice of religious literacy were strongly emphasised, as many of the participants indicated how it had an empowering effect on their lives and was assisting them to develop and empower themselves and others. For example, a woman who formerly had a severe drinking problem, but found God after moving to Wesbank, said: Ek voel ook nou, as gemeenskap, voel ek dat ons wil uitreik vir die Here. Ons wil graag na plase gaan waar die mense nie die woord van die Here hoor nie, so by die tronke en hospitale waar mense siek lê kan ons ook gaan om vir hulle te gaan bid. [I also feel now, as community, that we want to reach out for the Lord. We are keen to go to farms where people don’t hear the word of the Lord and at the prisons and hospitals where people are lying sick we can also go to pray for them.]

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Organisational management literacies One of the participants described her role as a literacy mediator in a project, set up to assist local schools, by visiting homes of children displaying behavioural and learning problems and helping families to deal with domestic and substance abuse: Die kinders sê miskien wat die probleem is, en hoekom hulle is soos wat hulle is, nie skoolgaan nie of hulle rook en drink. Dan gaan ons na die ouers toe en dan gaan luister ons hulle kant van die storie ook. [The kids perhaps tell us what the problem is, and why they are as they are, not going to school or smoking or drinking. Then we visit the parents and listen to their side of the story.]

She also applied this literacy in her role as a member of the Adult Education Centre Governing Body, another organisation in which she served. This was a clear example of how this participant was transferring or transporting literacy between contexts to empower herself and the organisations which she represented. The literacy practices of our research participants This subsection considers different forms of mediation where practices are passed on to novices that can be mined for participatory citizenship. A key literacy practice that our respondents relied on was the use of literacy mediators, who play a crucial role in socialising others into full participation in literacy events and community life. We have already commented on women like Aunty T and others as possessing a strong sense of agency and voice, as well as a particular level of schooled literacy, who played this role. Hernandez-Zamora (2010: 70) refers to literacy mediators as ‘more expert practitioners’ or ‘intellectual sponsors’. The women who depend on these literacy mediators could be said to be undergoing a form of literacy apprenticeship central to Lave and Wengers’ (1991) notion of situated learning. While the Adult Education Centre group followed more traditional ways of learning, according to their individual levels of literacy within the national Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) framework, a lot of informal learning and sharing also took place during the formal teaching sessions. Within the prayer and senior citizen groups, a variety of literacy practices could be identified. Firstly, when observing the prayer group, we noticed that prayers often evoked a ‘call-and-response’ method as can be seen in the following example: Prayer leader:

Oe Here onse Here, ons kom na u toe met al ons laste vandag … [Oh Lord, our Lord, we come to you with all our burdens today …]

Individual group members:

Ja Here, Ja Jesussss … [Yes Lord, yes Jesus …]

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Prayer leader:

Maar ons wiet u sal ons verlos van al ons swaarkry … [But we know you will deliver us from all our difficulties …]

Individual group members:

Hoor ons Here, hoor ons … [Hear us Lord, hear us …]

Secondly, the singing of gospel songs or well-known hymns also ensured that these oral texts were reinforced in those already familiar with the songs, while more recent members of the group did their best to listen carefully and to pick up the words and melodies. Thirdly, the reading of scripture from the Bible was done by those literacy mediators in the group with sufficient text literacy, and frequently, the more dynamic members of the group would give a motivational talk after the discussion of the scripture had been completed. It should also be pointed out that two of the women who had had little or no schooling managed to memorise particular Biblical texts as a result of long-term aural/oral exposure to these texts. Thus almost everyone had a role to play in the group’s activities, allowing for their existing literacies to be acknowledged, used and expanded. The type of situated learning we observed in the Senior Citizen’s Group included needlework, cooking and listening to presentations by various non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and government agencies which frequently required them to share information about themselves by filling in forms and sharing advice on dealing with domestic issues, such as abusive children who frequently tried to rob their elderly parents of their pension money. The latter was a recurrent theme, and the group occasionally invited speakers from the Social Welfare Agency and even the South African Police Service to inform them about their rights to protection from abuse. Such meetings were multimodal in nature and always involved making sense of texts (such as PowerPoint presentations or handouts). The methods employed in the literacy practices of the three groups varied from direct assistance by the more capable to the less capable participants, depending on the skills involved, and the ones that needed more strategic engagement. Examples of the latter included the ways in which the women made sense of the linguistic landscape of the township. For example, when looking at the product advertisements by the local supermarket, some women said that they looked at the entire image rather than the individual words, with a particular focus on price. In other words, they were only using what was directly relevant to their needs in the advertisements. Those who could afford cellphones also forwarded ‘chain prayers’ and spiritual or motivational messages to others, thereby encouraging engagement with the type of texts the women would be eager to receive and understand with or without assistance. The key informants in this study, particularly those in the group attending classes at the Adult Education Centre, exemplified high levels of active engagement to affect

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positive transformation in the lives of others, especially other women. This could be considered a role modelling practice that could benefit more women if emulated. The other female participants, by virtue of their involvement in a prayer group or organisational work, were empowering themselves, with some evidence that they were also trying to engage in empowering others. This suggests that engagement with the notion of positive transformation in post-apartheid South Africa is taking place in small, but concrete ways. .

Conclusion This chapter looked at the transfer of portable multiliteracy skills among three groups of women within the broader context of a society experiencing vast social and political changes. With an emphasis on individual and group agency, it challenges traditional perceptions of poor, working-class women as being victims of their circumstances, suffering from deficient education and incapable of empowering themselves. It offers further evidence that people in such situations, with limited access to formal education, can however access particular skills immediately relevant to their needs which help them to survive and even rise above their circumstances. Learning through the portable literacies identified in this chapter takes place based on real-life situations and actual needs, therefore these women show higher levels of motivation for this type of learning rather than formal learning contexts like the ABET classes. It can thus be said that portable literacies offer a greater chance for effective knowledge distribution and participatory citizenship than formal learning channels, for these formerly silenced members of the community. The effectiveness of the three groups reveals the importance of traditional support systems recreated in the urban environment, where the extended family is being replaced by support groups like the church, prayer groups, senior citizens’ organisations and so on, as valuable networks within which informal learning takes place. Also apparent from this study is that each woman had multiliteracy resources that could be shared with others. At the same time the rich linguistic varieties of the languages which the women brought with them as they migrated to Wesbank, offered more opportunities for harnessing multiple semiotic systems and different practices and modalities in their new environments. This is not meant to say that given the resourcefulness of ordinary people in their everyday lives, they can simply be left to their own devices without more opportunities for learning being provided by the state. We see the portable literacies identified in this study as stepping stones and support systems that should be complemented by creating integrated possibilities for engaging with text in more formal contexts if these women are to access the broader knowledge economy that would allow for them and their children to achieve better standards of living.

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Emotion, Voice and Agency in the Journals of Wesbank Women

Introduction Post-apartheid South Africa is engaged in a number of macro-discourses relating to current and future socio-political developments in the country. However, the microdiscourses of citizens at grassroots level are just as important in determining the key issues affecting the lives of ordinary people. As will be shown in Chapter 9, researchers need to be far more alert to the issues ordinary citizens express through their various discourses, instead of simply focusing on certain discourses pertaining to their research aims. In this chapter, an analysis of the discourses of a number of Wesbank women drawn from their personal journals is provided in order to see how they express emotion, voice and agency through writing. In analysing these discourses, we made use of the Appraisal framework of White (1998; 2000), Martin (1997; 2000) and Martin and Rose (2007). According to White (2011) the Appraisal framework can be defined as follows: A particular approach to exploring, describing and explaining the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positionings and relationships.

The Wesbank women who kept journals were selected by the Iilwimi Centre at The University of the Western Cape (UWC) to attend a three-week training course in domestic service in order to provide them with a qualification which would improve their employment prospects. Every day, they were transported from the township to the Bergzicht Training Centre in Stellenbosch. In their journals, they reflected on the experience of leaving the township on a daily basis in order to attend the course in a more pleasant environment, leaving behind circumstances of poverty and male dominance in most cases, their hopes for the future and their beliefs on whether or not the experience might enrich their lives.

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The chapter poses the following questions: 1. In what ways do these women express emotion, voice, and agency through the act of writing and reflection on their experiences during the training course? 2. Which recurrent discourses and attitudes appear to empower or disempower these women from becoming effective agents capable of challenging the positions they hold in their families and society? The focus on women It is no coincidence that women are central to both the previous chapter and this one. The majority of women in South Africa have been disadvantaged by both the apartheid system which severely damaged their physical and emotional security and by a paternalistic society which tried to keep women in perpetual subjugation to men. In the new South Africa, despite all the constitutional imperatives which guarantee freedom and equality for all, women continue to battle many obstacles of which poverty is a central component. In her analysis of African women’s writing in Southern Africa, Weiss (2004: 49) captures the essence of the condition of Black and Coloured women in post-apartheid South Africa which “include the trauma of the colonial past and apartheid with its aftermath; lack of education and vast poverty; traditional customs such as female circumcision …”. Another important aspect of this chapter is identity, which according to Williams (2010: 131), is ‘socially constructed and constituted’. The chapter reveals a clear link between the different discourses of the women in our study and their sense of personal identity. Apart from sharing a common disadvantaged identity with many women from other ethnic groups in South Africa, they also share particular group identities, viz Coloured and Afrikaans-speaking, or Black and isiXhosa-speaking. Language is a key indicator of identity, and the South African ‘Coloured identity’ is often attached to the Afrikaans language, as was the case with the majority of the Coloured women in this study. However, there are significant differences between being able to speak a language and to write in it. The women in our study used either Afrikaans or isiXhosa to communicate orally but their writing revealed a range of proficiency in other languages as well as practices such as blending and code-mixing. It should be pointed out that the journals written by the Coloured women were, with one exception, done in their first language, Afrikaans, while the Black women’s journals were written in English. The motivation for this as well as the problems it created, are discussed below. The data As was noted in the introduction, the qualitative research study on which this chapter is based used the Appraisal Theory framework to analyse the journals of a group of 25 unemployed women attending a training course to become qualified

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domestic workers. These women were selected based on their limited yet reasonable level of literacy (most having completed grades 5-7), the amount of time they had available, and their willingness and motivation to attend the course. A module aimed at improving the oral and written communication skills of the participants was included in the course. Each lesson in communication skills started with ten minutes allocated to writing their daily journal entries. The initial aim of the journal entry sessions was simply to see whether their writing skills were improving as a result of the communication skills module. It would appear that the course may indeed have helped to develop their literacy skills as was evident from their improved handwriting, language use, as well as the structure and increased length of the entries as the course progressed. It should be noted that two of the women initially selected dropped out of the course, resulting in only 23 journals being available for analysis. The women provided written permission for the use of their journals as research tools, on condition that their names and personal details were not disclosed. As a result of the language distribution of the group as a whole, the women were taught in two separate groups. One group, made up of 17 Coloured women, was taught in Afrikaans, while the other group, made up of eight Black women who were mainly isiXhosa-speaking, were taught in English, as the particular training centre had no isiXhosa-speaking facilitator. This, as argued by Barthus (2012: 70), was seen as discriminatory and unfair by the Xhosa participants. As one woman, using English as instructed, wrote angrily in her journal: W15: Our problem is when I’m speaking my language Xhosa they say I’m roed (rude), but the coloured people is speaking Afrikaans is write, I don’t mind to speak English, when I’m sitting with the coloured. So It’s our problem.

According to Barthus (2012) this particular woman is claiming a South African identity not only through ethnicity, but also through her dominant language, isiXhosa. In order to capture what she sees as defining aspects of this identity, she compares it to that of the Coloured group. Language is also a vehicle through which she positions herself in the South African context. She speaks isiXhosa, but this language, in this case, functions as a tool of exclusion from the other group of women doing the same course. Here, language also marks respect and she makes it clear that both groups consider it to be disrespectful to respond to others in your dominant language when they are unable to understand it. Her tone of voice is sarcastic, and the repetition of phrases like ‘our problem’, as well as ‘my language Xhosa’ reveals her frustration with what she regards as unfair discrimination through language. She is directly separating herself, as an isiXhosaspeaking woman, from the Afrikaans-speaking women. The expression of anger can also be seen as heightening her pride in herself and her own language, especially when that anger is directed at injustice, such as being forced to use English when members of another group are allowed to use their home language. Thus, as the

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research team we are left with the question: Would the data from the Xhosa women have been much richer if they had been afforded the opportunity to write in their home language, or were they sufficiently skilled in English to express themselves as forcefully and coherently as the woman quoted above? Another term that is descriptive of the journals analysed in this chapter is ‘participant diaries’ (Jones, Martin-Jones & Bhatt, 2000) because these women focused on both the cognitive and affective aspects of participating in a training course. Keeping a daily journal was one way in which they could be active, reflecting research participants instead of passive research subjects. For Jones, Martin-Jones and Bhatt (2000: 319) participant diaries are particularly well suited to studying how people act and interact in their daily lives, and effectively capture how spoken and written languages are blended in different literacy events. Having data as personal as journals/participant diaries to work with enabled us to ‘hear’ each woman’s voice, even of those who wrote very little. According to Blommaert (2005a: 4), voice is what people use to make themselves understood or fail to do so, and in using their voice, people have to deploy whatever discursive resources they have. In addition, they also need to adapt these resources to their particular. I am in full agreement with Blommaert when he further contends (2005a: 5) that voice “is the issue that defines linguistic inequality (hence, many other forms of inequality) in contemporary societies. An analysis of voice is an analysis of power effects”.

For these women, finding their voice and expressing it through writing, may not be enough as it does not necessarily signal an ability to move past locations in passivity. It is, however, an essential consideration in extending views about agency – not only what people are capable of doing within the circumstances in which they find themselves, but what they are willing to do. Labelle (2011: 174) sees agency as the type of control individuals exercise over the ways in which they present themselves to the world and contends that it depends on “the society they live in (and) the way in which their language encodes social categories”. Hernandez-Zamora (2010: 9) emphasises that the development of agency is inseparable from developing people’s literacy and education levels, as “their crucial role is to enable us to think and speak for ourselves”. In identifying the main discourses present in the journals of our respondents, we were guided by the presence of particular emotion words. Pavlenko (2005; 2011) and others have done valuable research into the links that exist between emotion and cognition and areas such as inner speech, language, thought, and autobiographical memory. Altarriba (2005) has demonstrated the ways in which memory is stimulated by particular emotive words such as love, envy, hate, and jealousy. For many of the women, the journals became a confessional in which they could be open about their daily experiences and the emotions aroused by these experiences. However, this act of writing could potentially place them in a (symbolic) space (Baynham & De Fina, 2005: 259) where they felt exposed, vulnerable, and possibly disempowered as they revealed the conditions of their lives. The research team, however, found

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the women willing to ‘open up’, particularly as they were writing in the confines of a classroom in the pleasant environment of the training centre with sympathetic facilitators. They had therefore been moved, albeit for a short period, from a disadvantaged space to a more privileged space which may have disposed them to unburden themselves in their journals. Appraisal Theory Appraisal Theory was initially developed as a branch of Systemic Functional Linguistics by Australian academics belonging to the Sydney School, viz. J.R. Martin, D. Rose, P. White, F. Christie, C. Coffin, J. Rothery and others (White, 2000). These researchers have explored the literacy requirements of the discourses of science, technology, the media, history, English literature studies, geography and the visual arts. Martin and Rose (2007: 17) offer the view about appraisal being concerned with evaluation, “the kinds of attitudes that are negotiated in a text, the strength of the feelings involved and the ways in which values are sourced and readers aligned”. These meanings, they argue, “realise variations in the tenor of social interactions enacted in a text” (Martin & Rose, 2007: 17). According to White (2000: 1), Appraisal Theory “is concerned with the linguistic resources … by which … speakers come to express, negotiate and naturalise particular inter-subjective and ultimately ideological positions”. In other words, APPRAISAL is a system of interpersonal meanings. We use the resources of APPRAISAL for negotiating our social relationships, by telling our listeners or readers how we feel about things and people (in a word, what our attitudes are) (Martin & Rose, 2007: 26; emphasis added).

Martin and Rose (2007: 25) argue that Appraisal is “concerned with evaluation – the kinds of attitudes that are negotiated in a text, the strength of the feelings involved and the ways in which values are sourced and readers aligned”. In addition, attitudinal positionings or relationships are always occurring through a process of negotiation due to the interactive or dialogic nature of discourse (Martin  &  Rose,  2007:  26). Discourses like those explored in our respondents’ journals therefore, provide indications or expressions of attitude. White (2000) wrote the following about analysing attitude: Attitudinal meanings are better seen as carried by utterances, by complete propositions than by individual words although in some instances it IS possible to point to individual lexical items as carrying attitudinal assessment. The unit of analysis, then, is the proposition or proposal, or a sequence of interconnected propositions or proposals, analysed in the context of the larger text in which they operate.

There are three main ways in which attitude is expressed, viz affect, judgement and appreciation. ‘Affect’ refers to the ways in which people express their feelings in discourse to indicate positive or negative feelings in a direct or implied manner (Martin & Rose, 2007: 29). ‘Judgement’ relates to evaluations of people’s character or behaviour. It can be expressed on a personal level to indicate admiration or criticism of people’s behaviour, and it can also occur on a moral level to suggest praise or

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condemnation (Martin & Rose, 2007: 32). Lastly, ‘appreciation’ can be identified by looking at the manner in which the value of things is construed through language (Martin & Rose, 2007: 37). Attitudes can also be amplified through graduation devices that highlight force or focus in a speaker’s statement. ‘Force’ relates to the use of words that intensify an expressed attitude such as ‘very’ or ‘extremely’. ‘Focus’ concerns the use of resources that make something that is inherently non-gradable gradable to sharpen or soften categories or concepts (Martin & Rose, 2007: 47). Compare, for example, the sharpened focus of ‘at precisely 12h30’ to the softening effect of ‘around 12h30’. Beyond attitudinal positionings with their negative or positive assessments of, for example, people, objects or situations, there is also what White (2000) terms as ‘Dialogistic Positioning’ or ‘Engagement’. “Engagement covers resources that introduce additional voices into a discourse via projection, modalization, or concession. The key choice here is one voice (monogloss), or more than one voice (heterogloss)” (Martin & Rose, 2007: 59). White (2000) lists the following key ‘engagement’ resources present in discourse: disclaimers, proclamations, probabilisations, and attributes. A sub-type of ‘dialogistic positioning’ is ‘intertextual positioning’, which is in its most simplistic form, the use of the words or thoughts of another by a speaker or writer. What we also found useful in relation to ‘engagement’ was to use an adaptation of this form of Appraisal as suggested by fellow researcher Slemming (2010). Like her, we also sought to identify traces of active engagement in terms of the women’s expression of the degree to which they were engaging beyond the conceptual and perceptual to the participative, i.e. where we saw evidence in what they said about their actions that illustrated a form of active, accountable behaviour, that could be considered transformative and empowering on personal and interpersonal levels. Applying Appraisal Analysis to participants’ journals: The findings A discourse analysis of the journals revealed four major discourses present in the writings of our respondents: ঋঋ faith in God; ঋঋ being trapped in the poverty cycle; ঋঋ feeling trapped by personal circumstances; and ঋঋ a desire for greater independence. In these four discursive themes, we found a strong relationship between the ways in which these women expressed emotion and how their individual voices and agency came through. Some women, especially those affected by domestic violence, appeared to be emotionally overwhelmed by their situations and were in great need

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of support to overcome their difficulties. Others appeared to be able to transcend these difficulties by persevering with the course and combating negative emotions with positive ones. The presence of these discourses pointed to the women’s particular value systems, as well as the different assumptions they made about the value and belief systems of their respective intended audiences. Our appraisal analysis provides more evidence of such values and beliefs and is done, firstly, according to the three sub-categories of attitude: affect (emotion), judgement (ethics) and appreciation (aesthetics). Secondly, we analyse the degree of engagement and dialogistic positioning in the journals. In this section, numbers (W1, W2, etc.) have been assigned to the participants in order to protect their identities. Attitude Analysis Table 5.1

Examples of Affect

W1: Ek is dankbaar vir God vir nog ‘n dag om hier te kan wees. [I am thankful to God that I can be here another day.]

Positive authorial affect.

W2: Ai die Here is wonderlik ek kan net vir die Here dankie sê dat hy my tot hier gestuur het. [Oh the Lord is wonderful; I can only thank the Lord for sending me here.]

Positive authorial affect and intertextual attribution to God.

W5: Deur die seer in my hart wat ek het, sê ek dankie vir God vir hierdie dag vir my lewe vir my kinders wat na my kan opkyk. My ma se suster is vermoor. En ek wil God nie bevraagteken. Ek weet dat hy my nooit ‘n kruis sal gee wat te swaar is om te dra nie. [Through the pain in my heart, I thank God for this day, for my life, for my children that look up to me. My aunt has been murdered. And I do not want to question God. I know that He will never give me a cross that is too hard to bear.]

Negative authorial affect coupled with positive affect, as well as nonauthorial affect in the responses of the children. Note also the intertextual attribution to God in the last sentence.

W20: It is about to know yourself as well. After I finish this course I would be very happy if I get the job so that I can put food on my table. Having three children without job is very difficult.’

Positive authorial affect coupled with negative affect in reference to being unemployed with three children.

W3: Ek voel baie ongelukkig vandag omdat my man my baie afkraak. [I feel very sad today because my husband often belittles me.]

Negative affect, amplified by negative non-authorial attribution to spouse.

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W11: As ek by die huis is dink ek alle dinge. Ek wou eenkeer my eie lewe neem so swaar dit met my en my kind was … [When I’m at home, I think all sorts of things. Once, I wanted to take my own life, that’s how badly it went with my child and me.]

Negative affect, amplified to show the depth of the participant’s despair at her circumstances.

In line with examples of affect as stated by White (2011), the examples in Table 5.1 indicate affectual positioning through the following indicators: ঋঋ verbs of emotion such as ‘is dankbaar’ [am thankful] and ‘is wonderlik’ [is wonderful]; ঋঋ adverbs such as ‘baie afkraak’ [often belittles], ‘very difficult’ and ‘so swaar’ [that’s how badly]; ঋঋ adjectives of emotion such as ‘very happy’ and ‘baie ongelukkig’ [very sad]; and ঋঋ nominalisation such as ‘die seer in my hart’ [the pain in my heart], ‘to know yourself ’. In addition, affect can either be positive or negative, as well as authorial (first person) or non-authorial (second and third person). Authorial affect occurs when people take responsibility for their response to other people, situations, or things, whereas non-authorial affect occurs when the emotions of others are described. ‘Intertextual attribution’ is the inclusion of the “words, observations, beliefs of other speakers/ writers” (White, 2011). In the examples above, we find intertextual attribution to God, children and an unsympathetic husband. These examples are also all dialogistic in nature and assume a dialogue with either God and/or the person reading the journal. In the first three examples, the women express themselves and their Christian identity mainly in the first person (ek [I]) and occasionally in the second person (jou [you]), as can be expected when writing a personal journal. They are therefore expressing their individual voice and religious ideology, belief, and experience instead of what Blommaert (2005a: 181) calls “massive and rock-solid universalhumanist principles”. In the extract quoting W5, she remains grateful to God, despite experiencing the tragic loss of her aunt. Of interest here is her strong reliance on faith and an acceptance of the ‘cross’ placed on her shoulders. It is also a matter of pride to her that her children look up to her as an example of Christian womanhood. It could be argued that, in conditions of dire poverty, women who have been let down and marginalised by human agencies, such as the government, naturally look to a higher power to find comfort and the necessary strength to face their daily struggles. Writing about their faith also self-identified them as decent, God-fearing women deserving of respect.

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Table 5.2 Examples of Judgement

W18: On this day it is Wednesday whereby the English speaking people like Xhosa and Afrikaans speaking like coloureds[.] We are different groups but we are not one, say for instant the Xhosas prepared food and we shared with the other group, but the coloureds doesn’t want to share with us as Xhosa.

Explicit negative authorial judgement of the behaviour of the Coloured group, coupled with non-authorial affect by the Coloured group, who do not wish to share their food with the Xhosa group.

W4: My ma is bitter kwaad vir my omdat ek is waar ek vandag is. Dit maak my baie ontevrede omdat sy kwaad is vir my. [My mother is furious with me because I am where I am today. It upsets me a lot because she is angry at me.]

Non-authorial (the mother’s criticism), as well as authorial affect (W4’s description of her current state), coupled with authorial explicit judgement (W4’s response to her mother’s criticism).

W11: … Ek kom uit so ‘n huis waar my ouers so beklei het en ek voel so ‘n lewe is nie vir my nie. Nie net vir my nie maar is onregverdig teenoor my kind. [I was raised in a house where my parents always used to fight and I feel that a life like that is not for me. Not only for me, but it’s also unfair towards my child..

Explicit negative judgement and negative affect attributed to parents.

W13: … nou begin hy met my kind skel, sê ek sal nie kos koop nie want jy is nie my kind nie nou gee ek miskien antwoord dan slat hy my blou oë slat my met hamers en slat my kind … [… now he starts to scold my child, saying I won’t buy food because you are not my child; and if I maybe give an answer then he hits me leaving me with blackened eyes. He uses hammers to beat me and he hits my child …]

Explicit negative judgement of boyfriend’s violent behaviour coupled with extra-vocalisation/intertextual positioning from the boyfriend’s direct words (in bold).

W2: Ek voel my man is besig om my te intimideer en ek het elke keer toegelaat dat hy dit doen. Hy kry dit reg om my skuldig te laat voel, maar ek weet dat ek moet deurdruk met waarmee ek begin het. [I feel that my husband is intimidating me and I have allowed him to do it every time. He manages to make me feel guilty, but I know that I must persevere with what I have begun.]

Explicit negative judgement of spouse’s experiencing intimidating behaviour, but also of the fact that she has allowed it until now.

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Judgement, as was previously noted, involves either positive or negative evaluations of human behaviour. For White (2011) the analysis of judgement must take account of both explicit and implicit judgement. Implicit judgement can be carried out by unevaluated facts, while explicit judgement is usually indicated by lexical items that carry judgement value. We can see explicit judgement in all the examples listed in the table above, e.g. ‘don’t want to share’, ‘bitter kwaad’ [very angry], ‘slat my blou oë’ [hits me, giving me blackened eyes], and ‘besig om my te intimideer’ [is intimidating me]. In addition to the extra-vocalisation from the boyfriend in the quote by W13, who uses his direct words in her writing, these lexical items have the potential to evoke negative judgement in the reader as well. The examples above represent the reality for most of these women – trapped in poverty and frequently subjected to racism, crime and violence, with unsupportive partners and parents who were too poor to provide them with a good education. The example from W11 shows how family violence forms part of the recurrent cycle of poverty for these women. They have grown up in homes where such violence was common, and now they experience it themselves. Abusive and unsympathetic partners are powerful figures in the lives of these women, coupled with a lack of support in running the household and helping with the children. Two women dropped out of the course after the first week because their partners objected to them attending classes. Those who persevered, like W2, often had to deal with negative comments at home. The sometimes startling honesty with which they unburden themselves in their writing shows that they are fully capable of using their voice (Blommaert, 2005a) by drawing on the discursive means they have at their disposal. Table 5.3 Examples of Appreciation

W5: Ek geniet dit om ‘n student van Bergzicht te kan wees. [I enjoy being a student at Bergzicht.]

Positive evaluation of studying at Bergzicht, where the course took place.

W17: May God bless you and be with you all the years. Keep on all the good work and do the same to the others. We love you, and you are a “HERO”.

Positive evaluation of the course.

Positive evaluation of the lessons. W11: Dit was ‘n lekker dag maar ek het weereens baie geleer hoe ‘n wasmasjien en droer te behandel. Ek was baie beindruk met die nuwe lesse. [It was a nice day but again I learnt so many things like how to use a washing machine and a dryer. I was very impressed with the new lesson.]

While appreciation is most commonly concerned with aesthetics, White (2011) and his fellow researchers also include positive and negative assessments of processes and state of affairs under this subcategory of attitude. The three examples above all

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reveal an appreciation of the training course. It appears to have been a very positive experience for most of the women and a welcome break from their daily lives. This was in fact the only aspect singled out by them for positive appreciation, which could be another indication of the harshness of their reality. Engagement and Dialogistic Positioning

White (2015) sees engagement as the ways in which the writers “adjust and negotiate the arguability of their utterances”, and he further contends that all utterances that can be classified as engagement are ‘dialogistic’ in nature, as the speakers or writers “present themselves as taking up, acknowledging, responding to, challenging or rejecting actual or imagined prior utterances”. The examples in the table below can be seen as attempts by the women to ‘talk back to’ or challenge particular assumptions, persons, or groups. Table 5.4 Examples of Engagement

W7: Het geleer om daardie ekstra myl te loop. Al dink die ander ek soek witvoetjie. [(I) have learned to walk that extra mile. Even though the others think that I am trying to curry favour with the facilitators.]

Proclamation: Pronouncement of improved ability plus attribution and extra-vocalisation of the thoughts/negative perceptions of others.

W5: Ek wil nie eintlik ‘n domestic wees nie. Met die sertifikaat kan ek op my eie ‘n werk soek in ‘n factory. [I don’t actually want to be a domestic worker. With the certificate I can find a job in a factory on my own.]

Disclamation: Counter-expectation of course qualifications.

W15: I like to work because I’m suffering and I’m poor I’ve got child so I want to give my child to be educated so if I’m staying at home no one gives me the information like what’s going on outside.

Proclamation: Expectation that the course will lead to employment, as well as the education of the writer’s child.

W6: Ek wil graag ‘n goeie inkoms hê sodat ek onafhanglik van my man kan wees. ‘n Mens wil baie keer iets gaan koop dan moet jy maar los, want jy moet eers alles vra. [I would really like to have a good income so that I can be independent from my husband. Many times, you will want to buy something but then you must rather leave it because you must ask for everything.]

Proclamation: Expectation that the course can change the life of the writer, providing her with independence from her husband and the freedom to buy what she wants.

W4: Dit is nie altyd goed om jouself aan ander mense te open nie. Som kan baie negatief wees, en baie weer sensitief. [It isn’t always good to open yourself to other people. Some can be very negative, and others very sensitive.]

Proclamation: Pronouncement coupled with Probabilisation – the likely negative effects of opening up to others (in this case, via sharing their journal entries with one another).

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Some of the key engagement resources as listed by White (2015) are used by the women quoted in the examples above. These are: ঋঋ proclamation, including expectation and pronouncement – these are formulations that challenge any contradictions, like the expectations of W6; ঋঋ disclamation, including counter-expectation – the introduction of alternative positions in an assumed dialogue, as with W5; and ঋঋ probabilisation, including evidence, likelihood, and hearsay – these are possible points of contention the writer wants to point out, as can be seen with W4. W7 did not allow the negative perceptions held of her by the rest of the group to divert her from working hard on the course. Despite the social power of the group, which could be intimidating to some women, she did not allow any negativity to influence her. W5 planned on using her new qualification to look for work beyond domestic services, which is an indication of her ability to decide for herself what she wants to do with the skills she has gained, instead of just following the expected outcome of becoming a domestic worker. Although the course elicited appreciation from most of the participants, W4 was critical of the communications facilitator who asked them to share some of their journal entries with each other at the start of one session. She clearly felt that some personal issues should not be shared with others. A strong sense of personal agency (Labelle, 2011) is present in these extracts, which show that the women were doing their best to remain positive although faced with many difficulties. W15 appears determined to find work after completing the course in order to provide her child with an education. It is evident that all the participants wanted to gain skills through the course so that they could take better care of their children and also establish and accomplish a sense of independence. They longed, like W6, for the luxury of not having to rely on someone else for money or food and to have some control over their own lives, thus moving from a position of disempowerment to one of empowerment. Conclusion Through an Appraisal analysis of the journals of 23 women, this chapter has revealed the ways in which these women express emotion, voice, and agency through the act of writing and reflecting on their experiences during a domestic worker training course. The chapter also attempted to uncover the recurrent discourses and attitudes which appeared to empower or disempower the women from becoming effective agents capable of challenging the positions they hold in their families and society. Their micro-discourses have shown that the key issues affecting their lives include being trapped in the poverty cycle and by their personal circumstances, which include abusive and unsupportive partners, as well as a desire for greater economic independence. Their faith in God was also a constant refrain throughout their journal

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entries. Most of the women presented themselves within what Barthus (2012: 96) calls ‘the frame of motherhood’ or as victims of their circumstances. They were all deeply grateful to the course facilitators, describing them as ‘heroes’ and ‘saviours’, which once again stresses how eager they were to improve their circumstances. Furthermore, whenever describing the negative attitudes of others (specifically other women attending the course), they implicitly contrasted it with their own good sense of soldiering on with the course. Much has been written about the marginal status of women in Southern Africa. As a consequence, one of the goals of the study was to find out how these women felt about this condition. We note from the discourses analysed that the Xhosa women believed themselves to be more marginalised than the Coloured women, and saw the behaviour of the Coloured group as contributing to that existing sense of exclusion. This attitude is perhaps the result of the differential social spaces these groups occupy within their community. As Barthus (2012: 96) contends: “For some of the women, the effect is a further erosion of their self-esteem as they consider themselves inadequate even among other women”. At the same time, they all appeared to believe that employed women with good literacy skills and formal education enjoy a much higher status in society because they constitute a visible ‘elite’ group, far removed from their personal experience of discrimination, ignorance and poverty. Keeping a daily journal within the context of a more enabling space gave these women the opportunity to respond to both the positive, empowering forces and the disempowering forces in their lives, by giving them a channel for self-expression. The application of Appraisal analysis provided the research team with evidence of strong agency and voice coming through in certain entries, but we also noted that such confidence could, with the same respondents, slip back into depression and a sense of being overwhelmed in some of the entries that followed. However, each woman’s journal ended very positively – either because they wanted to impress their facilitators or because there had been a positive change in the way they see themselves. The practice of keeping a journal was clearly empowering, not simply as a means of practising a literacy skill, but also because it provided them with the opportunity “to produce a lasting, consequential, thoughtful discourse artefact” (Blommaert, 2005a: 96). A common thread throughout the journals was that this course could be a lifeline, empowering them to become strong, independent working women. Although there are a number of exceptions, such as the women who dropped out of the course, these journals as a whole embody their transformation from a disempowered position to a more empowered position with the aid of the course. While we would argue that, in some cases, the positive effects only lasted for a short while, in other cases, the effects were much more enduring. Proof of this is that of the 23 women surveyed, 14 went on to secure meaningful employment, while conditions for the other nine women remained unchanged when we did a follow-up study six months later.

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3

6

The ‘Messy Linguistic Market’ of Wesbank

Part Three (chapters 6-8), offers an analysis of the ‘messy linguistic market’ in the semiotics of this hybrid township – a linguistic landscape reflecting, to a large degree, the economic level of the population of Wesbank, the type of multilingual practices that can be found in cross-cultural families, which is termed here as ‘truncated multilingualism’, and the language practices visible in the teaching of English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa at Wesbank High, practices defined here as ‘peripheral normativity’. I derive the term ‘messy linguistic market’ from Blommaert’s seminal book, A Sociolinguistics of Globalisation (2010). As with the examples provided in his book, the linguistic market of Wesbank, in particular the communicative codes operating in its business hub, are not defined by single languages, but by a semiotic mix of images, bits of languages used in semiotic and emblematic ways, and at times, single languages on more official signage. Thus the commercial spaces in Wesbank are marked by many different linguistic varieties, accents, grammars and symbols. Among the most interesting communicative features are those used by small businesses (like ‘house/spaza shops’ and hair salons housed in old shipping containers) to attract customers. Introduction As noted above, the focus of this chapter is on the ‘messy linguistic markets’ of the public realm (Lofland, 1989), as the people of Wesbank learn to get along with others from other cultural and linguistic backgrounds within this super-diverse space. My reference to ‘super-diverse spaces’ necessitates a closer definition of the concept of superdiversity, as first formulated by Vertovec within the context of the United  Kingdom. Vertovec (2007: 1024) sees superdiversity as being “a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade”. For Stroud (2014: 399), the core of super-diversity lies in the greater mobility of people across the world, both physically and virtually. For Blommaert (2010: 7), however, superdiversity is reflected in “the complex multilingual repertoires in migrant neighborhoods” which house a diversity of different nationalities, where often “several (fragments of) ‘migrant’ languages and lingua francas are combined”. Wesbank with its blend of

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translocal and transnational migrants can be said to have some of the features of a superdiverse neighbourhood, such as learning to cope with differences and diversity – a far cry from the days of separate development/apartheid and the Group Areas Act of 1951. However, as could be seen in the journal extracts of the Xhosa women in Chapter 5, racial divisions continue to exist, with language playing a central role in keeping people apart. As was seen in Chapters 2 and 3, the Wesbank community presents many stories of disrupted lives and identities, as a result of people being forced to move to the city from other parts of South Africa and other African countries due to factors like rural poverty, unemployment, war and the desire to create a better life. Yet moving to the city also comes with a multitude of socio-economic problems. It can be argued that Wesbank, and other similar townships that have emerged in post-apartheid South Africa, is just one notch above the pervasive squatter camps that circle the country’s towns and cities. I argue that very few families move to such townships out of personal choice but mainly, as our research has shown, because of family links and the chance to live in a house rather than in informal housing. Whenever the opportunity arises, they move on to different, possibly better spaces, and are instantly replaced by others. Some older people even move back to their places of origin and some families sublet their houses as a means of economic survival. Much of the data for this chapter was gathered at the township’s meeting places: the main street shopping centre next to the taxi rank (the only means of public transport in and out of the township), and the Multi-Purpose community centre. It was in these particular spaces where we examined the attempts of some adults to master the social skills, rituals and repertoires necessary in order to participate in daily life in Wesbank. For some of the inhabitants, most notably those newly arrived from other provinces and traders from other African countries, there was a much greater need to use these skills to survive and make a living in this space. For the majority Coloured Afrikaans-speaking population, there was less pressure to acquire such skills, but even among them, we found people willing to make the effort to learn and use ‘bits’ of informal English and isiXhosa in order to facilitate better communication with speakers of other languages and to run their small businesses more effectively. Therefore, the chapter provides evidence of the notions of ‘conviviality’ (Gilroy, 2004) and the ‘commonplace diversity’ (Wessendorf, 2010) of the township, or what Blackledge and Creese (2015) see as the interplay between common and everyday ‘differences’ versus ‘sameness’. The kind of interplay they refer to is evident in the responses of people in Wesbank who attend some of the international churches run by foreigners, such as the following extract from an interview we conducted: J: Wanneer hulle byvoorbeeld sing en ek verstaan nie kan jy net hande klap. Die pastor is ‘n Brazilian. Hy travel elke jaar van different kerke om die boodskap te bring. [When they sing for example and I do not understand, you can just clap your hands. The pastor is a Brazilian. He travels from different churches each year to bring the message].

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In this extract, we see the informal blending of Afrikaans and English so typical of this community. The speaker, a young man who is mainly Afrikaans-speaking, regularly attends services at one of the international churches operating in Wesbank, and when he doesn’t understand the words of the hymns or choruses sung during the service (some in English or Portuguese) he can still join in nonverbally by clapping his hands to the beat of the music. The particular church he is referring to is one that has migrated from Brazil and has gained a foothold in most major South African cities, attracting people in such large numbers that it has been able to erect its own church buildings. It is also clear from this extract, that the pastor is unable to interact with his congregants in Afrikaans and uses his own particular variety of English, flavoured with much of the idioms and accents of Brazil. Many people find the ways in which these Brazilian pastors speak charming, in contrast to the often hostile responses evoked by the accents of speakers from other African countries. The derogatory term makwerekwere is often used to refer to the latter group. It is said to mimic the way in which the African foreigners speak, who are often identified by their inability to speak or pronounce local languages correctly. The cautious conviviality we discovered during our first interactions with the community overlaid traces of racism and xenophobia, which could at times easily explode or be manipulated to become more visible. As noted in Chapter 1, this is especially true during instances of political tension like local and national elections, when politicians exploit past racial divisions for personal gain. A number of Somali shopkeepers have also been murdered in Wesbank for various reasons – either because of robberies or because they have fallen victim to contract killings, with gangsters being hired by local shopkeepers to eliminate them as they are often accused of undercutting the prices charged for goods. The Wesbank marketplace: A cautious conviviality According to Gilroy (2004: 108-109) conviviality stems from what he terms ‘grassroots multiculturalism’ – “a mature response to diversity, plurality and differentiation … oriented by continuous, everyday exposure to difference”. In other words, conviviality exists wherever people are in daily contact with diversity and are able to handle it with confidence and ease while at the same time celebrating commonalities. The concept of conviviality is closely related to what Wessendorf (2010) calls ‘commonplace diversity’, which refers to how communities experience and perceive ethnic, religious, linguistic and socio-economic diversity as a normal part of social life instead of something particularly special. Wessendorf (2010: 11) argues that what is needed to navigate commonplace diversity are “certain patterns of behaviour or intercultural skills which are needed to facilitate everyday social interactions in a super-diverse context” – which she terms ‘corner-shop cosmopolitanism’.

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In Wesbank, our observations showed that young people were more adept at handling the commonplace diversity in the township than older people whose ideologies and beliefs had no doubt been shaped by their experiences under apartheid and their continued negative perceptions of other groups for multiple reasons. Language also tends to keep the older generations apart, as was noted in Chapter 4. In addition, we observed that language could be a divisive factor while observing the senior citizen workshops at the Wesbank Multipurpose Centre. Here, the Afrikaans-speaking Coloured group used a different room to the Black, largely isiXhosa-speaking group, and this separation appeared to be accepted without much question. As one Xhosa lady commented with reference to the Coloured group: “They only speak their Afrikaans. They can’t speak English like we can”. The reference to ‘their Afrikaans’ indicated that this woman did not see Afrikaans as a common language that anyone in the community could learn and use, but as a language identified with a specific group. She also appeared to believe that her group was in a superior position linguistically than the Afrikaans-speaking seniors, as they could not only use their home language, isiXhosa, but also English which serves as a lingua franca in the township. The Multipurpose Centre where we worked with senior citizens is situated close to the main business hub of Wesbank. It should be pointed out that the business hub also attracts people from other nearby townships like Delft. In this particular space, where the research team did a great deal of informal observation, it was evident that most people had some understanding of the majority language, Afrikaans, but did not necessarily speak it. Evidence came from conversations with a number of informal Xhosa traders who understood our queries put to them in Afrikaans but preferred to respond in English. In turn, many Coloured Afrikaans-speaking shoppers opted to address Xhosa traders in English, and their willingness not to impose Afrikaans on these traders helped to maintain a convivial atmosphere. One Xhosa trader who had been living in Cape Town for five years, after leaving her village in a rural part of the Eastern Cape Province, shared with us that her employer came from another African country and had been in South Africa for some time, during which he had acquired a little bit of isiXhosa, which he uses to communicate with her. Coloured traders occupying the same space demonstrated their knowledge of isiXhosa, especially through the use of words identifying particular goods such as fruit and vegetables. Their use of faux isiXhosa, for example through inserting the prefix ‘i-’ to English words (i-carrots, i-cabbage, etc.), and attempts to code-switch to isiXhosa in order to assist their Xhosa clients, were accompanied by helpful paralinguistic features such as gestures and facial expressions, along with much laughter. They never failed to use terms like mama for older women, sisi for younger women, bhuti for men and even tata for older men. This type of conviviality appeared to play two roles: firstly, it was useful in attracting Xhosa customers and aiding the interactional transactions needed to sell their goods, and secondly, it was a cautious

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attempt at bridging the gap between people who had in the past been forced to live in separate areas. We found that English was used for interlingual communication, especially within the local supermarket and in shops owned by people from other parts of Africa. Their small shops had been fashioned from shipping containers which now served as hair salons, mobile phone shops and spaza shops which sell food and other goods. Initially, the transnational migrants from countries like Somalia and Nigeria showed little inclination to acquire either Afrikaans or isiXhosa, as English appeared to be meeting most of their needs. However, many have now acquired some basic expressions in both languages, and some of the Nigerian men have married South African women, which has helped them both in terms of language acquisition and intercultural communication (Nchang, 2014). The employees in the supermarket were either Coloured or Xhosa, and while most used English with customers who could not speak Afrikaans or isiXhosa, these shop assistants and security guards agreed that they were picking up bits of one another’s languages through daily exposure. We observed one manager speaking Afrikaans to a Xhosa security guard. He started in English, then gave up and switched to Afrikaans, which the guard clearly understood. However, we learned that management posts in the supermarket were occupied mainly by Coloured people, which may be an indication of the power structures in the township. It was also interesting that some of the Coloured people we spoke to responded somewhat negatively to the speaking of English by Xhosa people, while at least one Xhosa trader refused to interact with a research assistant who addressed him in Afrikaans. An informal Coloured trader, who came from Paarl to Wesbank every day to run his fruit and vegetable stall, was however eager to interact with us, as was his young assistant from another township. The assistant made use of Kaaps after learning that my research assistant was from a township close to his own. The trader told us that he responded in English to Xhosa customers, but that he always initiated interaction in Afrikaans. While he expressed pride in his son picking up words and expressions in isiXhosa, he appeared to have some negative attitudes towards the language himself, which we could derive from his body language and somewhat dismissive gestures. Having been a trader in Wesbank for over three years, he commented that the township had undergone a lot of change, becoming much more multilingual and multicultural. I have used the term ‘cautious conviviality’ in an attempt to capture both the acceptance of some people and traders to the commonplace diversity of Wesbank, as well as the negative perceptions and behaviours, particularly with regards to language use. In general, there is a great deal of caution among South Africans when it comes to interacting with other racial groups because of the glaring inequalities that continue to beset our country. Much of the negativity of the past remains, and

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languages are still largely seen as belonging to particular groups instead of being communicative resources that can be acquired by all. It can only be hoped that the cautious conviviality we observed in the main business hub of Wesbank will continue to improve and to foster better relationships among the different groups in the community. The linguistic landscape of the Wesbank market: Multilingual literacies on display Nowhere is the messy linguistic market of Wesbank more evident than in its linguistic landscape (Williams, 2012). Anyone coming into Wesbank may initially assume that most of the signage will be in English; however, there is much evidence of the underlying multilingualism and multiliteracies of the population. For example, business advertising uses mostly English to convey a message with minor additions of Afrikaans and isiXhosa, in some cases. In contrast, handmade signs advertising local ‘house churches’ (churches operating outside traditional churches, usually led by a charismatic pastor) mainly make use of Afrikaans. While Afrikaans had considerable currency in the linguistic landscape of the township during the first few years of our research, its presence in later years was often signalled by a more emblematic role on English signs largely, or on its own in informal handwritten notices. For example, in those early years, Afrikaans was used exclusively on important handwritten notices. Was there then no concern for those who could not read Afrikaans, or was it assumed that the majority population would translate such information to the other inhabitants? Important printed handbills were at least bilingual in English and Afrikaans. As for isiXhosa, its presence could only be found in trilingual government signs (Figure 1.3), in one advertisement for a dentist (Figure 1.1), and emblematically on a sign for an informal tavern or shebeen (Figure 6.4). One could argue that in an economically deprived space, such as Wesbank, the production of multilingual signs is an additional expense for businesses. English, which serves as lingua franca, not only here, but in the rest of South Africa, may have to suffice in order to accommodate the largest number of people. Thus, there may be more practical rather than ideological reasons for the very few signs using Afrikaans and isiXhosa. Nevertheless, signage is an important indicator of economic activity taking place in Wesbank, which is always encouraging to witness in economically deprived areas. In addition, people related to us that the signs added colour and interest to the Main Road, and helped them to locate particular businesses. Signage in Wesbank fall into the following categories: trilingual government advertising, following the guidelines of the Western Cape Language Policy of 2006; professionally produced business advertising; a blend of printed and handwritten signs on house shops; and handwritten signs which range from those which are carefully laid out to those which simply convey the message without any attention

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to aesthetics. As previously noted, the signs in the area reveal a good deal about the multiliteracy levels of its producers – their levels of education, attempts at acknowledging the multilingualism of the community in order to attract customers, skill in blending images with language and whether they are professional signwriters or ordinary people creating their own signs. Ultimately, space can be said to have indexical qualities in which the signage can construct the space, with different languages used for different genres and having different levels of importance. The construction of the signage is also related to the income level of the vendors. Shohamy and Gorter’s (2009) point on ‘free space’ being dominated by the powerful is evident in Wesbank, especially through the large advertisement for a dentist (Figure 1.1). Some of the signage on the hair salons/barber shops may also indicate the presence of particular powerful gangs in the area, e.g. the sign ‘Thug Life’ on one hair salon. A closer analysis of selected signs The image below is an example of a handmade sign advertising the goods of a fresh fruit and vegetable vendor in the marketplace outside the supermarket:

Figure 6.1 Handmade sign

The sign in Figure 6.1 shows creativity through the use of colours to make the sign more attractive. The signwriter makes an attempt at writing neatly with all numbers and letters being large and clear. There is also consistency with the letters

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mostly written in uppercase, with the exception of ‘sweet’ in ‘sweet melons’; there is however an indication that something has been erased and that this particular word has replaced it. The fact that each fruit has its own designated space on the sign shows the organisational skills of the signwriter – this is indexical to the signwriter’s graphic organisation abilities. In the ‘Mix Fruit’ section, it is evident that there is limited space between ‘3p.t.k’ and ‘R8’, but there was still the need to insert the word ‘for’ and the way in which the signwriter does this is still very creative, evident in the way it is diagonally written. The sign is written in English with the exception of the Afrikaans word pruime [plums]. Perhaps this was the only word the vendor was unable to identify (indexical of his English proficiency). Alternatively, it might be the only word used by the community members (indexical either of the community’s English proficiency or their practice of mixing and blending the languages in their environment). The latter can be an indication that the signwriter is a ‘Cape Coloured’, comfortable with the blending and mixing of Afrikaans and English (McCormick, 2000). Most of the vendors’ signs reveal that the signwriters in the township clearly put some thought into who their consumers are and what their needs are in order for these signs to be recognised and accepted by the community. The multimodality in most signs, apart from creating visual appeal to attract potential buyers, also helps people with an incomplete education to derive the meaning. This latter point emerged in Williams’ (2012) MA study of senior citizens and their ability to make sense of the linguistic landscape of Wesbank. Even vendors who are less familiar with local perceptions of signage take account of what may attract customers, often relying on internationally-recognised brands and icons. For example, one of the hair salons owned and staffed by Nigerians attempts to bridge linguistic and cultural barriers by drawing on a religious movement that has crossed international borders with its iconic leadership and distinctive reggae music – Rastafarianism. In Figure 6.2, the Rastafarian theme is being used to attract clients, as can be deduced from the green, yellow and red colours, generally associated with the Rastafarian movement, which has also been adopted by certain South African communities. Rastafarianism is a religion which originated in the West Indies, based on the ideas of Marcus Garvey, who called on Black people to return to Africa. The late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia is believed, by Rastafarians, to be the incarnation of God, and the use of marijuana is a sacrament (Webster’s Encyclopedia, 1990). ‘One love’ is a typical phrase used by Rastafarians as a rallying call to unite all members of its movement internationally, and is also the title of a song by Bob Marley – a leading Rastafarian and undoubtedly the most iconic reggae musician of our time.

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It is clear that a considerable amount of effort went into creating a sign that is visually appealing. This can be seen by the neat way in which it is written and the graphic organisation of the text (i.e. uniform size, colours, particular font, and the overall design). The word ‘powerfull’ is a common misspelling of ‘powerful’ and does not detract from the effectiveness of the sign. Indeed, it may very well be an indication of the kind of peripheral normativity that exists in spaces such as Wesbank (Blommaert et al., 2005).

Figure 6.2 Rastafarian-themed hair salon

The service provided is clearly stated by the phrase ‘Hair Salon’ andis repeated in the wording ‘Barber shop’. It could be argued that the signmaker is sending out the message that this is a unisex salon. It is, however, unlikely to attract many female clients apart from those of the Rastafarian faith, given the masculine elements in the signage – the colours, font size and the construction of the building. In contrast to the previous two signs, the house shop in Figure 6.3 provides evidence of the ‘messiness’ that a multilingual space like Wesbank allows, without seriously detracting from the message such a blend of signs can convey. The photo shows the eye-catching shop-front of a local house shop, displaying a variety of signs, shapes and fonts. The two dominant items on display, ‘Coke’ and ‘Coca-Cola’ are indexical to one product and should therefore be indexical to one meaning, however, in this instance it is not the case. With reference to the significance

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of letterform in the construction of a sign, even though the two words make use of the same colour scheme, ‘Coke’ is not written in the same font as the trademark ‘Coca-Cola’ sign, and therefore does not hold the same meaning, as the signmaker may have intended. Scollon and Scollon (2003: 130) argue that “a change in font, even when the colour scheme and the words are the same, brings about a significant change in meaning”.

Figure 6.3 House shop

The signage on this shop, with its blend of formal and informal styles and local words and spellings, is an excellent example of multiliteracies and multivocality. For example, the older sign Biesmilah has now been replaced by the correct form of the word ‘Bismillah’ (in the name of Allah). The phonetic spelling of Biesmillah may indicate that the previous owner was a Coloured South African. The new Somali owner made use of a professional signwriter, who has used the correct spelling on a much more prominent and attractive sign. The use of this Arabic word may signal the new owner’s desire to integrate with the local Muslim population, possibly for protection from xenophobic attacks, given the many attacks on Somali-owned shops in South African townships and informal settlements. Other interesting features in the signage on the shop include the use of Spigety instead of spaghetti, as well as the informal Afrikaans word Bompies, which is a term

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for sweet, fruit flavoured ice. The signwriter cannot spell ‘spaghetti’ but he uses artistic license to copy the shape of two strands of spaghetti to indicate to customers that this product is in stock. A number of signs signalled awareness by the vendor and/or signwriter of the multilingual nature of the community and the need to make people from different linguistic backgrounds feel welcome in these businesses through the strategic, although messy, use of their home languages. This was evident in the following sign for an informal tavern (popularly referred to as shebeens).

Figure 6.4 Informal tavern

While the sign is predominantly English, the final two lines offer multilingual directions to the tavern’s entrance in English (‘Turn Right’), Afrikaans (Draai Regs) and a blend of isiXhosa and English (Ngena eRight). While the Afrikaans is an exact translation of ‘Turn Right’, the attempt at including isiXhosa leads to a peculiar type of languaging, in which the use of isiXhosa is more emblematic than in fact a true translation. Ngena means ‘enter’ instead of ‘turn’ while eRight has taken the English word ‘Right’ and has ‘Xhosalised’ it by adding the isiXhosa prefix ‘e’. ‘Xhosalisation’ is the phonological adaptation of English terms into isiXhosa as s a mnemonic device (Paxton & Tyam 2010: 255). The signwriter is clearly not very familiar with isiXhosa, but still uses his limited knowledge in order to attract Xhosa customers. It does

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however appear that the isiXhosa sign may have been added as an after-thought, given its position at the bottom of the sign together with the capitalisation of each letter, with the exception of the prefix ‘e’. Further proof for this is that the Afrikaans ‘Draai Regs’ is placed on the same line as the English ‘Turn Right’ and is followed by the large red arrow indicating towards the entrance as if the signwriter believed that he had completed his task. The frequency of language use in the linguistic landscape of Wesbank shows the privileged position of English in the township’s signage. Graph 6.1 indicates the ratio in percentage of how often a language appears on the signage of Wesbank. English, as the local lingua franca, is used to such a great extent due to the diverse group of cultures and nationalities that make up the Wesbank community of Wesbank, which includes residents, as well as vendors, who spend most of their time in the area.

100 80 60 40 20 0 English

Afrikaans

Xhosa

Language Graph 6.1 Language Occurrence on Signage in Wesbank

To explain Graph 6.1 in more detail, English has a 100% frequency rate because it appeared on all signage analysed within a chosen area, while the ratios for Afrikaans and isiXhosa are equally low with 27% and 20% respectively. The results can be interpreted in two ways: the use of Afrikaans and/or isiXhosa may increase over time, or English may maintain its dominant position and in the process replace the other languages practised in the community. However, there is a counter-argument to the belief that English threatens the vitality of other languages in this domain, especially if we see language as a local practice instead of ‘a describable entity’ which replaces or oppresses other local languages (Pennycook, 2007: 86-87). Pennycook argues that English should be seen as “embedded in local practices” as it “has always been local” in post-colonial, post-modern Africa.

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What do the vendors say about their signs? Relying on convenience sampling, a number of vendors were interviewed about the signage they used to advertise their different businesses, and this section will offer an analysis of three of these interviews (V#1-3). Although the following is a straightforward discourse analysis, there are also elements of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in this analysis. If CDA explores power relations both in and over discourse (Titscher, Meyer, Wodak and Vetter, 2000), then it was difficult to ascertain who exactly was ‘the powerful’ in Wesbank. Our approaches were guided by the fact that in most cases the vendors did not hold positions of power and were thus unable to dictate what appeared on their signage. As already pointed out, many of those managing shops and stalls were foreigners from other parts of Africa, with absentee owners living outside of the township. They, therefore, had very little input in the design and wording of the signage. As an example of such a situation, the first interview presented here was conducted with an employee working at the Mother City hair salon (Figure 6.5).

Figure 6.5 Mother City hair salon

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Interview 1 Mother City hair salon

Interviewer: Vendor 1

So you basically just chose what you like. And then the colours, green and red? Does that mean anything specific?

(V1): green and red? No I didn’t choose these colours, he the one that choose it.

Interviewer:

okay and then Mother City? Why did you write Mother City there? V1: It’s the owner of the salon.

Interviewer:

Oh the owner of the salon. So do you think it refers to Cape Town? V1: I think so.

The interviewer initially thought that the vendor chose the graphics and colours on the sign based on personal preference. However, as the interview progressed, it became clear that there was a miscommunication and that the barber, a Congolese man, was not the owner of the hair salon. He kept emphasising the words ‘the owner of the salon’ and that he had no input in the signage. In contrast to the first interview, the second interview was conducted with the owner of a cellular service shop (Figure 6.6).

Figure 6.6 Cellular Services shop

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Interview 2 John’s Cellular Services

Interviewer: Vendor 2

Okay so this is your business, right? The cellular service, is your name J?

(V2): (nods)

Interviewer:

Who wrote your sign for you? Who wrote this? V2: Who? I write it myself.

Interviewer:

You wrote it yourself. Okay so why did you decide to write it like that? V2: (silence)

Interviewer:

Okay, why didn’t you use any pictures? V2: Pictures? Why I don’t use pictures? No I don’t have pictures.

Interviewer:

Sorry? V2: I don’t have pictures.

Interviewer:

You don’t have pictures okay. Why did you decide to write in English? V2: It’s the only language I can explain to the people … (fades away)

Interviewer:

English okay and what is your home language? V2: French.

Interviewer:

French. Do you speak Afrikaans? V2: Not really, I can understand but I can’t speak.

Interviewer:

Okay. So this is the language that you and the people of Wesbank also understand. V2: Yes.

Interviewer:

And where did you go to school? V2: Not here, in my country, in Burundi.

Interviewer:

Would you change your sign if people couldn’t understand it? V2: No, I don’t think I will change it because this is the one that people knows me because if I am changing they might think that this J is not here, that I am not working here anymore.

This vendor’s competency and skills are revealed by the fact that he ‘wrote’ the sign himself and also understands the purpose of branding and trademarks to a certain extent. This becomes clear when he states: “No I don’t think I will change it because this is the one that people knows me because if I am changing they might think that

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this J is not here, that I am not working here anymore”. Judging from this comment, it is clear that the community identifies his signage specifically with him – a person with whom they have an established relationship. As he puts it: “this is the one that people knows me”. When the vendor says: “I don’t have pictures” it shows that the absence of multimodal features in his signage (with the exception of the MTN sign, which is the logo of a leading cellular phone company) may be due to a lack of resources on his part. It was evident that he regarded English as the lingua franca in Wesbank: “It’s the only language I can explain to the people …”. This also reveals the language practices within the community from a social perspective, which is that they bridge their linguistic divides by using English for ease of communication and comprehension. As this business owner comes from Burundi, he may have very limited knowledge of languages other than English, and so it cannot be said that he shows disregard for other languages spoken in Wesbank. The third interview presented here was conducted with the owner of the local butchery (Figure 6.7), a man with good proficiency in English, as can be seen by his choice of words, e.g. ‘accommodate’. This vendor, who lives in Pinelands, is yet another example that most vendors who work in Wesbank do not reside in the area.

Figure 6.7 Butchery

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Interview 3 Butchery

Interviewer: Vendor 3

Okay so this is the Halaal ‘meat vleis’ shop, right? Who did your signs for you?

(V3): A guy, (name) did the signs for me.

Interviewer:

Okay why did you decide to use him? V3: He is doing our work all the years, that is why.

Interviewer:

You gave him the idea? V3: Yes.

Interviewer:

Why this idea? V3: I think it is eye-catching – and that is obviously the reason for people to see. They must give it a look and a second look you know what I mean?

Interviewer:

Okay … V3: … attract attention …

Interviewer:

Attract attention. Okay another thing is why did you use meat vleis meat? Why did you choose to use both translations? V3: Because there is English speaking people and Afrikaans speaking people and some people don’t really know the difference. Afrikaans people, some of them don’t understand what ‘meat’ is and some English people don’t know what “vleis” is. So we try and accommodate everybody.

Interviewer:

Okay, accommodation. Okay what is your home language? V3: English.

Interviewer:

Okay have you ever tried to see if your signs were effective in the community? V3: Well, obviously because I mean business is good …

Interviewer:

Okay business is good. And where did you go to school? Do you live in Wesbank? V3: No I stay in Pinelands.

The vendor shows an understanding of the use of graphics and multimodal signage. With reference to the signage used by the butchery, he states: “I think it is eyecatching – and that is obviously the reason for people to see. They must give it a look and a second look, you know what I mean? Attract attention”. This shop owner

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clearly understands the ways of reaching his customers through two useful methods of signage: eye-catching visuals and using two languages in order to reach a bigger market. An unrecorded interview was also conducted with the dentist whose advertisements are clearly visible in the area (Figure 1.1). He was unwilling to be recorded, and so what follows is based on fieldwork notes. The dentist resides in Rondebosch, a middle-class southern suburb of Cape Town, and owns a main practice in Delft, one of Wesbank’s neighbouring areas. He is the only dentist in Wesbank, and therefore there is a great demand for his services. He can therefore afford the large signs promoting him in the area, done by a professional signwriter. The dentist also displayed a strong awareness of the Wesbank community as being multilingual, and his use of isiXhosa in his advertisements was in order to attract Xhosa customers. When asked about the absence of Afrikaans, he answered that most Afrikaansspeaking people in the area used the word ‘dentist’ rather than the Afrikaans word tandarts. He was therefore aware of the ways in which the local community mixed and blended languages and did not feel that he caused offence by only using English and isiXhosa. Conclusion This chapter has attempted to capture the ‘messy linguistic market’ of Wesbank. It has shown how people have learned to communicate with a somewhat cautious conviviality across the linguistic and cultural barriers in this super-diverse space. The ‘corner-shop cosmopolitanism’ (Wessendorf, 2010) is particularly evident in local signage and the explanations provided by the vendors and signwriters with their particular brand of multiliteracies. Despite a significant majority of the population being Afrikaans-speaking, Afrikaans signage has diminished over the past few years to be replaced by English, but the language is still present in handmade signs and graffiti. There is very little signage in isiXhosa and business owners, especially those who are foreigners, assume that English signage will be acceptable to all. However, the emblematic presence of Afrikaans and isiXhosa shows the awareness among some business owners of the multilingual and multicultural nature of the community, and the need to acknowledge the township’s two majority languages. Many of the businesses owned by foreigners from other parts of Africa signal a desire for acceptance and belonging by emphasising the oneness of Africa through symbols such as those associated with Rastafarianism and Islam, which appears to be an appeal to African solidarity in the face of local xenophobia. We believe that this community reflects, to a large extent, “the discourse of cultural becoming, social mutations, and recombinant identities”, which Jacquemet (2005: 274) argues will allow us to begin to understand how new and evolving communities are learning to communicate in the late-modern age.

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7

Truncated Multilingualism: Theory and Practice

Introduction In the introduction to this book, truncated multilingualism was presented as a key concept used to describe the multilingualism found in Wesbank. The aim of this chapter is to analyse this much-contested notion, including alternative concepts regarding urban multilingualism with an emphasis on the language practices of young people, especially those from a small number of cross-linguistic, cross-cultural families in Wesbank. By way of introduction, this chapter begins with a narrative of a township teenager’s language use in intimate settings. Sophie (not her real name) is a 15-year-old, Grade 10 teenager residing in Wesbank. Although predominantly raised in a variety of Northern Cape Afrikaans, she uses Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa, as well as blends of these languages in intimate setting. Her language use patterns depend very much on her relationships with the people she interacts with. Her Xhosa father was raised in the rural town of Upington, where he acquired Afrikaans, the town’s dominant language, and her Coloured mother grew up in another predominantly Afrikaans-speaking town, Sutherland. While both parents attended high school, only her father managed to matriculate. Sophie was taught to pray in Afrikaans, and continues this practice, but reports talking to herself in a blend of isiXhosa and Afrikaans, and dreaming in a blend of isiXhosa, Afrikaans and English. At home, she uses predominantly Afrikaans when speaking to her parents and brother. Interestingly, the family’s youngest sibling is addressed mainly in English as a result of pressure from the mother’s relatives in one of the older Cape Town suburbs, Elsies River, where English has a higher status than Afrikaans. At the same time, the young girl is learning isiXhosa from a cousin. When visiting close family, Sophie uses all three languages, as well as blends of them depending on her relationship with them. She uses isiXhosa when visiting her grandmother, with whom she has a polite but not too close relationship. With her mother’s side of the family, as well as her boyfriend, she uses predominantly English blended with Afrikaans expressions. On the streets of Wesbank, she uses all three languages, switching to isiXhosa or English with isiXhosa speakers and Afrikaans with her other friends. Sophie’s family attends an Afrikaans church, but where those who do not speak the language are accommodated by a switch to English.

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At first, the above case study may seem like a simple description of an ordinary multilingual teenager’s language use in an informal, intimate setting. However, viewed

against South Africa’s socio-historical context, such families are the exception rather than the rule. In a society formerly marked by the rigorous, enforced separation of different races, Sophie’s working-class family forms part of a small, but growing minority of cross-linguistic, cross-cultural households. The existence of such families is of interest to researchers across a broad spectrum of disciplines, because racial groupings in South Africa have remained divided to a large extent until this day – which marks 18 years after the country’s first democratic elections (Deumert et al., 2005; Parnell, 2004). In addition, post-democratic South Africa is marked by profound social divisions between the rich and poor. With limited or no viable escape routes from poverty and inequality, it might be argued that the socio-cultural identities of especially the poor and working class have remained largely unchanged since the advent of democracy in 1994. What then happens to language and identity when people from different ethnolinguistic backgrounds in South Africa get married and raise families? How is language used in such families? What choices do they make regarding the languages in which their children will be raised and what influences these choices? As there is an unassailable link between people’s languages and their sociocultural and personal identities (Appel & Muysken, 1987; Dyers, 2001; Edwards, 1995; Tabouret-Keller, 1998), a very clear signal of both group and individual identity would surely be the languages that dominate in intimate domains or, as preferred by Blommaert et al., 2005b, ‘dialogic spaces’ of language use, such as the home and in various interactions with family members, immediate neighbours and close friends. As argued by Boxer (2002: 4), the family domain “is fundamental to the building of identity through language socialisation”. The language/s through which children are socialised initially, within the family domain, must therefore play a crucial role, not only in shaping their identities but also in ensuring the continued vitality of such languages. The vitality of a language or variety thereof can be measured by the number of functions it serves, as well as the importance or status of those functions (Edwards, 1995: 100-101). Further indications are its social status within the community and the solidarity between its speakers. In addition, researchers like Yamamoto (2005) and Tannenbaum (2003) argue that family interventions can help to ensure the continued vitality of vernacular languages or increase the pace at which such languages are edged out by others. This chapter will further examine the complex nature of communication in intimate settings against Wesbank’s multi-ethnic and multicultural background. The aim is to argue for a more considered approach to the contested notion of truncated multilingualism viewed against the repertoire of languages used in particular families, and how these reflect issues of socio-cultural identities and language vitality.

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Truncated multilingualism and its alternatives The concept of ‘truncated multilingualism’ was first used in a paper by Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck (2005) entitled ‘Spaces of Multilingualism’. They argued that the best starting point for an understanding of this concept was the somewhat outdated, yet still useful notion of ‘domains’, which Boxer (2002: 4) simply refers to as “a sphere of life in which verbal and non-verbal interactions occur”. Domains include areas of work, education, family, friends, places of worship, and so forth. However, drawing inspiration from Bakhtin (1981), regarding the dialogic nature of all utterances, Blommaert et al. (2005a) argue that domains consist of different ‘dialogic places’ and different ‘interactional regimes’, particularly in what they term ‘polycentric spaces’ (Blommaert et al., 2005b). According to them, interactional regimes refer to the range of ‘centres’ humans respond to interactively and in which there are dominant voices of authority – the popular child on the playground, the lecturer in the classroom, the parent, etc. – and people adjust the way they speak according to the different dominant voices they encounter. Blommaert (2010: 40) defines polycentricity as follows: Polycentricity is a key feature of interactional regimes in human environments: even though many interaction events look ‘stable’ and monocentric (e.g. exams, wedding ceremonies), there are as a rule multiple – though never unlimited – batteries of norms to which one can orient and according to which one can behave. These different interactional regimes enforce a type of domain specialisation which as previously mentioned, Blommaert et al. (2005a: 205) labelled ‘truncated multilingualism’ – “linguistic competencies which are organised topically, on the basis of domains or specific activities”. In multilingual societies, it can be argued that truncated multilingualism allows for a large degree of communication across linguistic boundaries. This does not mean that all people are fully competent in the different languages they use. Instead, their linguistic competencies may vary greatly across different domains. For example, a Wesbank teenager may use a blend of different codes as part of his performance of urban slang (e.g. the local Tsotsitaal), but be unable to interact fully in such codes when talking to an older person who may insist on being addressed in a certain code only. Truncated multilingualism is also influenced by a range of factors, such as language attitudes, levels of literacy, access to quality education, socio-economic class, and especially location. Thus the marginalisation resulting from living in a poor working-class township such as Wesbank, will definitely influence the language choices made by its inhabitants. They may want to indicate their social class and solidarity with speakers of the same language or language varieties in the township, thereby signalling their particular ethnolinguistic identity. At the same time, they may wish to signal their willingness to engage with speakers of other languages

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or codes by infusing their speech with words and expressions from languages they would not typically use. To a large degree, Wesbank enables this kind of broader multilingualism, although people may also be unable to use certain prestige codes, such as standard varieties, effectively. The concept of truncated multilingualism has not been favourably received by all sociolinguists. Canagarajah (2014: 79), in particular, notes his reservations about this term, as well as the term ‘fragmented multilingualism’ (Blommaert, 2010), given that these terms treat “translingual practices as deficient” and assumes “a purported whole language as the norm, forgetting that wholeness is a social and ideological construction that people provide to their language resources”. Instead, Canagarajah favours the concept of ‘performative competence’ which he sees as a distinctive competence multilinguals use “to negotiate the diverse, unpredictable, and changing language norms in the contact zone” (Canagarajah, 2014: 99). Both the above-mentioned concepts, when related to the Wesbank case studies, appear to have some merit. In the opening narrative of this chapter, we see how Sophie’s performative competence helps her to engage with the different interactional regimes she encounters when communicating with different family members. Yet, we also pick up on the different levels of competence she has in language varieties she has acquired since birth, which seems to better correspond with the definition of truncated multilingualism. Apart from Canagarajah’s ‘performative competence’, another alternative offered to the concept of truncated multilingualism is ‘metrolingualism’ (Pennycook & Otsuji,  2010). This concept, as argued by its creators, makes provision for both the ‘fixity’ and ‘fluidity’ of language practices. Thus in most local contexts, the urban dweller can draw on both ‘fixed’ (standardised) codes for use in particular, often formal contexts, as well as on more ‘fluid’ codes where they mix and blend the linguistic resources available to them in informal contexts. For Pennycook and Otsuji (2010), the ‘local’ is central, resonating with Canagarajah’s ‘contact zone’ or Blommaert et al.’s ‘dialogic places’. If stripped of the ideological acceptance of language hierarchies, where the standard code is always at the top, it must be agreed as argued by Canagarajah (2014) that translingual practices should not be viewed as deficient. After all, they meet several of the needs of their speakers, particularly within the dialogic places of necessity or basic survival. As for the ‘whole languages’ which he sees as the starting point for the definition of truncated multilingualism, it can be argued that these ‘whole languages’ represent the linguistic codes in which speakers have greatest communicative or performative proficiency, which may not necessarily be complete languages. My understanding of truncated multilingualism is based on the metaphor of a tree with a complex roots system – some codes, like a tree’s prop roots and taproots, run deeply into the soil (i.e. these codes are well developed), while others are shorter and

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‘cut off’ at a particular point of development – owing to, possibly, a lack of interest in continuing to learn the language, changing circumstances, poverty, leaving school with an incomplete education or moving out of a environment in which that particular language or code had great currency. Other codes, just like the roots of older trees, have become so deeply intertwined over time, to a point where it is almost indistinguishable, representing the hybrid code-mixed blends of our urban environments that scholars like Lytra and Jørgenson (2008) and Juffermans (2010) have labelled ‘translanguaging’, or simply ‘languaging’, as was defined in Chapter 3. The metaphor of a tree’s root system is supported by the narratives that were collected in the cross-linguistic, cross-cultural families we encountered in Wesbank, which the next section expands upon. Examples of truncated multilingualism in Wesbank In carrying out research on language use in intimate domains, my research team wanted to test the common ideology (Collins & Slembrouck, 2005: 192) that only one or two languages would be used in the environment of the home, in interactions with friends and relatives and even in intrapersonal communication. We anticipated mainly Afrikaans and some English in Coloured homes, and isiXhosa and some English in Xhosa homes. English is a compulsory school subject for all South Africans, and we were therefore justified in making the assumption that it might also be used at the homes of our target research population together with their mother tongues. Given the very real and sometimes politically engineered tensions among these two groups in the Western Cape (Dyers, 2004; Plüddeman et al., 2004), we assumed that we would find little or no use for Afrikaans in Xhosa homes, or for isiXhosa in Coloured homes. In other words, we believed that the two groups would be operating within their own distinct ‘frames’, which 40 years of enforced separate development would have entrenched even further. For Goffman (cited in Benford & Snow, 2000: 21), frames are ‘schemata of interpretation’ that enable individuals “to locate, perceive, identify and label occurrences within their life space and the world at large”. Frames help to render events or occurrences meaningful and thereby function to organise experience and guide action. How we construct our individual and social identities can therefore also be said to be a process of framing, in which language choice in different domains plays a vital role. Our respondents for the study on truncated multilingualism were Grade 10 pupils, aged 15 to 17, from cross-linguistic, cross-cultural families. With the exception of one migrant from the city of Johannesburg, all have moved to Wesbank from other parts of the Western Cape or the rural districts of the Eastern Cape. The following factors formed part of the discussions and interviews: ঋঋ parental influence (closeness of relationships, choices imposed regarding language in the home) ঋঋ level of parental education (e.g. illiterate, literate and educated up to primary/ secondary/tertiary level, employment)

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ঋঋ influence of, and relationships with, other family members ঋঋ peer group influence ঋঋ influences of environment ঋঋ level of family income These factors, as well as the surrounding environment, were important influences on the language choices made by the respondents in their intimate domains. In the interviews, the intimate domains were sub-divided into the following categories: ঋঋ speaking to yourself (e.g. swearing, exclaiming, praying, thinking aloud), in order to determine spontaneous language use; ঋঋ speaking to your closest relatives, to determine the dominant languages at home; ঋঋ socialising outside the home, to determine the language/s most used in informal settings; and ঋঋ language/s used at places of worship -a domain which straddles both the private and public domains. The family of the respondent would most likely attend a place of worship where they could use their mother tongue with ease (although this is not always the case). Two language teachers, one of isiXhosa and the other of Afrikaans, assisted us with the selection of the pupils. In informal discussions held in the staff room, they also gave us insight into the pupils’ cross-linguistic families. In their opinion, these pupils appeared to be comfortable among different languages and more open and empowered as a result of their much richer linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The Afrikaans teacher said: “They are already there where we want to be”, thereby signalling her sense that being multilingual and multicultural are important components of becoming ‘ideal’ South Africans. The Xhosa teacher was of the opinion that if such young people could become the norm rather than the exception, this could have important implications for racial tolerance and harmony in areas of linguistic and cultural confluence such as Wesbank. What emerged from our interviews with these respondents (not their real names) were individual narratives which showed how they constructed their own sense of linguistic resources within the context/space of a peripheral working-class township. We gave them the opportunity to choose the language in which they wanted to be interviewed. Afrikaans-speaking pupils responded in a non-standard, dialectal variety of Afrikaans in which they clearly felt most comfortable, even though some of them believed that they were using standard Afrikaans, while the codes used by Xhosa pupils ranged from a simplified version of deep rural to urban isiXhosa, blended with English and Afrikaans words and expressions.

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An analysis of the case study of ‘Sophie’, as presented in the introduction to the chapter, reveals that the dominant language of her intimate domains is Afrikaans – with her parents, brother, most of her friends and at the church attended by her family. English, occasionally mixed with Afrikaans, is used to communicate with her young sister, her boyfriend and her mother’s English-speaking relatives. She uses isiXhosa with her paternal grandmother, with whom she does not have a close relationship, and with isiXhosa-speaking people in Wesbank’s public domains. Sophie’s case study shows similarities to that of ‘Beauty’, one of the Xhosa pupils in this study. In Beauty’s family, isiXhosa dominates in the intimate domains, but Afrikaans and English are also present. Her father and younger siblings appear to be quite proficient in Afrikaans, while her eldest brother prefers to interact in both isiXhosa and English. With her Coloured friends, Beauty interacts mainly in English mixed with some Afrikaans. What follows is a breakdown of reported language use in the different intimate categories by all the respondents. In the category ‘speaking to yourself’, the Afrikaans respondents used mainly Afrikaans, and occasionally English and isiXhosa. One respondent reported using only English swear words, while another said he prays in English. Informal isiXhosa dominated in the intrapersonal domain with the Xhosa respondents, and only one reported using Afrikaans swear words when talking to himself. In the category ‘speaking to your closest relatives at home’, only one Xhosa respondent reported the use of another language, Afrikaans, with her father. Two of the Xhosa respondents reported that their parents did not allow them to use this language at home, possibly because of its association with a repressive past (Malan, 1996). However, among those who defined themselves as ‘Coloured’, the picture was far more complex. Despite the dominance of Afrikaans in most of their homes, codeswitching to other languages also occurred, depending on the family member being addressed. This pattern was particularly marked in those respondents from cross-linguistic, cross-cultural families. For example, in the case of ‘Enrico’, his mother would address his brother and sister in isiXhosa, but switch to Afrikaans when the children were present – a phenomenon Auer (1998: 7-8) would describe as ‘preference-related switching’. The mother may have taken the conscious decision to raise the children in Afrikaans because of the environment in which the family now finds itself, where Afrikaans enjoys a much higher status than isiXhosa. The topic of conversation would also influence the pattern of code-switching in the home. One of the female respondents, ‘Edith’, reported scolding her younger sister in Afrikaans, but gossiping in isiXhosa with her brother about certain neighbours. Edith said that isiXhosa functioned as a kind of ‘secret code’ between her and her brother. The examples described here support Boxer (2002) and Yamamoto’s (2005) findings on the role of family influence and intervention in the maintenance of mother tongues. They also provide further evidence of Blommaert et al.’s (2005b) ‘dialogic places’ which allow for more than one language to be present in the same domain.

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Outside the home, English was relied upon as a lingua franca between speakers of different languages. However, new networks of friends and neighbours meant more exposure to each other’s languages, resulting in Afrikaans-speakers who also spoke some isiXhosa with their Xhosa friends and vice versa. Thus ‘John’, one of the Coloured boys, reported using a mixture of Afrikaans and isiXhosa with his friends. In places of worship, English was frequently used to accommodate speakers of other languages. The Afrikaans respondents attended churches where their mother tongue predominated, as did the Xhosa respondents. However, in some of these churches, hymns were also sung in other languages. The overall pattern to emerge from this study was of either Afrikaans-dominant or isiXhosa-dominant families which could also use the other two main languages of the township with varying degrees of proficiency in their intimate domains. We also note that in the case of both Sophie and Beauty, their choice of language in their intimate domains was dictated by the nature of the relationship with the addressee. At the same time, these relationships also allowed room for the use of other languages as can be seen from the following excerpt of the interview with Sophie, on her young sister being raised in English, while also being exposed to Afrikaans and isiXhosa in her intimate domains: … um-um … sy’t Afrikaans … innie begin het sy Engels gepraat, en toe praat ons met haar Afrikaans sodat sy altwee die tale kan leer … oppie oomblik leer sy van my niggie nou Xhosa. [uhm … she (got?) Afrikaans … in the beginning she spoke English, and then we spoke Afrikaans to her so that she could learn both languages … at the moment she is learning Xhosa from my cousin].

Two of the male respondents used Afrikaans (or rather a variety thereof) as an important marker of their individual identities. Most of the Coloured respondents claimed that they could express their strongest emotions in Afrikaans. One of the boys was quite proud of his Afrikaans identity, and the fact that he spoke the language without mixing it with other languages. Although he used a blend of informal Afrikaans and Kaaps during the interview, he appeared to believe that he was speaking standard Afrikaans. In other words, his negative attitude towards any form of language blending was contradicted by his actual language behaviour. The following extract from his interview, where he reported on how he tried to get girls to go out with him, is a typical example: Wat maakit dan? Kan daar niks tussen ons twee gebeur? As sy smile staan ek ‘n kans. As sy vir haar opruk – nieee wat … [How about it? Can nothing happen between us? If she smiles I stand a chance. If she gets angry – not at all].

In South Africa, as in other countries, a more sophisticated use of English is increasingly becoming a marker of belonging to a higher social class. The study showed that some of the respondents regarded English as playing a part in creating social distance between members of the same family. They felt that people who

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were better off spoke English for the most part, and did not live in the township. One respondent felt that English was largely for use with outsiders, adding: My pa se suster se kinders praat Engels. Hulle is daai “hoë mense”. Hulle kom nie vir ons kuier nie. Ons het mossie die geld nie. Hulle sallie eers kom kyk hoe dit gannie. [My  father’s sister’s children speak English. They are those ‘high class’ people. They don’t visit us, because we don’t have money. They won’t even come to see how we are].

The association of English with a better life outside the township may explain why Sophie’s family decided to raise the youngest family member in English. This respondent’s family is not unique in making the choice of educating the younger children in English, because of the very strong belief of the privileges that come with an English-medium education. Researchers have shown that this is a common practice especially among Coloured families, but increasingly also among other ethnic groups in South Africa (Malan, 1996; Anthonissen & George, 2003; Plüddemann et al., 2004). Conclusion The findings reported on in this chapter came from a study which investigated whether teenagers in Wesbank were experiencing truncated multilingualism or a language shift towards English, the dominant language of power in South Africa. In order to find answers to this question, we examined language use in the intimate domains of our teenage respondents to see whether such domains supported language maintenance and spread, or provided evidence of language shift. Not only did we find that our respondents’ mother tongues were strongly maintained, but also that these ‘dialogic spaces’ allowed for the use of other languages. The use of other languages appeared to be influenced by their relationships with family members and friends. We also found that the languages used in the intimate domains continued to be spread to younger members of the family or through the peer groups with whom the respondents interact. In discussing the concept of truncated multilingualism, the chapter has also revealed particular language practices as the embodiment of post-apartheid experiences – the willingness, particularly among the young, to embrace change, but also the tendency among some to slide back into pre-democracy groupings and language practices. What makes this concept an effective way of capturing the reality of communication in Wesbank, is that it helps to reflect how communities with distinctive ethnolinguistic characteristics, who had formerly been kept apart by the apartheid regime, are now forced by their new environment to communicate with one another. Thus at some point ‘whole languages’ may very well have been the starting point for this concept, particularly as used in the education system or in separate communities living in their own ‘group area’.

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The evidence presented here may indicate that Wesbank is a site of truncated multilingualism, despite the presence of English – a powerful language of wider communication. Three enabling factors appear to influence the continued vitality of the other languages: the space in which the people find themselves, emotional identification with particular mother tongues, and the need for new social networks. Firstly, this is a poor, working-class community on the periphery of Cape Town, living in relative isolation from the more prosperous parts of the city, where there is a substantial shift to English as the common language in many domains. Secondly, many respondents reveal a close emotional identification with particular mother tongues like Afrikaans and isiXhosa which may have resulted in part from recent migration from areas where these mother tongues predominated. Thirdly, as the population is made up of migrants from different areas, new social networks had to be created, and people had to learn to quickly adapt to the languages used within these networks. The youth, who meet in spaces like school classrooms, playgrounds, the streets of Wesbank and one another’s homes, appear to have adapted to their new multilingual and multicultural environment with relative ease, and many are proud of their ability to interact in other languages.

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8

Peripheral Normativity in Language Classrooms at Wesbank High School

Introduction This chapter analyses and discusses the literacy practices in the language classrooms at Wesbank High, specifically those practices observed as enacted in the English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa First and Second Language classes. Of relevance in introducing this chapter is Street’s (2001) definition of literacy practices – those uses, values or meanings that underpin specific literacy events (situations in which reading and writing are important activities) and that embed them within socially determined structures or ideological spaces. One may thus ask what ideologies and meanings underpin the literacy views and activities of both teachers and pupils at Wesbank High, or what issues in the broader socio-cultural environment inform the construction of their literacy events. Interestingly, Street (2001) points out that, while literacy practices will often have to do with formal literacy acquisition, there will be cases where it has very little to do with reading and writing per se. Life experiences, addressees, intergroup relations, issues of symbolic and cultural capital, identity, and a host of other factors, often requiring ethnographic unearthing, may underpin literacy conceptions and activities. As Makoni (2014: 367), in his chapter in the book African Literacies (eds. Juffermans et al. 2014) states: Since literacy practices are an important individual identity marker, and individuals are situated in fluid and dense forms of the present, and given the unpredictability of the future, literacy practices have to be understood as shaping and shaped by the contexts they are embedded in. There are no two or more individuals with identical literacy practices because each person’s personal history and experience of literacies is unique even if the individuals share the same context of situation.

In this chapter, I concentrate specifically on the language behaviours of both teachers and pupils within the language classrooms. How do teachers of the main languages taught at Wesbank High assess the language competencies of their pupils who have such complex multilingual repertoires and are differently literate in each of their languages? How do they encourage optimal participation to ensure that pupils get

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plenty of practice in the language while at the same time coping with disciplinary challenges like overcrowded classrooms and bad behaviour? Which language varieties are included or excluded, and what types of language attitudes are typically expressed by both pupils and educators? In considering the literacy practices in this school, I draw on a paper by Blommaert, Muyllaert, Huysmans and Dyers (2005): Peripheral Normativity: Literacy and the Production of Locality in a South African township school, which reported on research carried out in Wesbank High’s English language classrooms. This chapter provides more data and discussion on this phenomenon, with examples taken from the Afrikaans and isiXhosa language classes at the same school. I also examine possible criticisms of ‘peripheral normativity’ in this chapter. These include arguments stating that, by allowing for a scalar normativity that can only work within the confines of the township, there is the risk of ‘lowering standards’ of language teaching and thereby depriving these pupils of a ‘proper education’; that peripheral normativity buys into an ideology that only standard language varieties enable people to succeed in life; that the language teachers, especially those who teach English, should be ‘ashamed of themselves’ for not being able to speak and teach these languages properly, and so forth. What are the factors leading to peripheral normativity? Before addressing the factors that lead to the type of peripheral normativity observed in Wesbank High’s English classes, it is important to interrogate the definition of this concept critically. The starting point for Blommaert et al. (2005:  388) is the notion of ‘grassroots literacy’ which they define as: A form of literacy which results in very restricted literacy repertoires and in which, consequently, the norms and codes of literacy are deployed differently, in a different system of visualisation of meaning. It is not ortho-graphy, but hetero-graphy, the deployment of literacy techniques and instruments in ways that do not respond to institutional ortho-graphic norms, but that nevertheless are not completely chaotic, even if such chaos appears to be the most conspicuously feature.

The restricted literacy repertoires referred to in the quotation above are the direct result of many of the factors influencing the population of Wesbank within the context of South Africa’s historically unequal society. Given the country’s recent history of separate development, Black and Coloured people were severely marginalised with restricted educational opportunities. Inhabitants of all ages, especially older people may therefore have an incomplete or a complete lack of formal education. This has resulted in a range of multiliteracies which the people apply to survive within certain limited circumstances. Various people, as can be seen in Chapter 4, have found creative ways of responding to the world of text, even if it means calling on others with better formal literacy skills. This reality persists with children who were initially sent to school but were forced to drop out owing to severe poverty, parental

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neglect, teen pregnancies, drug abuse and criminality, thus becoming cut off from the literacy practices of the school. Also, merely attending school may not develop literacy as effectively as one might hope if the home environment does not encourage more extensive literacy through having reading material available or parents who are seen to be engaging with texts. Chapter 3 points out some of the difficulties people encounter if they wish to develop reading for enjoyment, given the lack of a library and other possible resources to obtain books, newspapers and magazines. In addition to the above factors, there are the hindrances to literacy development within the school domains. Our South African education system continues to put little value on the particular language resources with which children from poor and working-class backgrounds enter school, leading to a type of marginalisation where the child cannot participate fully in classroom activities owing to effectively being ‘silenced’ in the classroom. In this respect, Wesbank High is a good example of how many Xhosa pupils struggle to adapt to classrooms where neither the teachers nor the other pupils speak their home language. To that one can add those language teachers with their own restricted literacy repertoires, who never adequately acquired the language they are required to teach. Finally, teachers dealing with diverse classroom populations may aim for a very restricted and overly simplified repertoire of ‘classroom talk’ in order to try and communicate with those pupils who do not speak their language. In such situations, as suggested by Blommaert et al. (2005), the rules and varieties of literacy are adapted to suit the circumstances, initially appearing chaotic, but soon developing some system in which real and valid communication and learning can take place. In countries like South Africa, hampered by inadequate schooling provision for language teaching, underqualified teachers, overcrowded classrooms and inadequate resources, these grassroots literacies remain pupils’ basic toolkit for literacy development. As they move through the schooling system using this toolkit which appears to meet their basic needs within their particular communities, they may make some minor adjustments to their orthographic skills, but still enter high school with many of these limitations still in place. What, therefore, are teachers to do in such situations? Blommaert et al. (2005: 392) argue that their classroom literacy practices are typified by ‘peripheral normativity’ in which: teachers and pupils appear to share some of the features of writing and make typologically similar errors—both groups appear to different extents to be part of a particular hetero-graphic literacy complex, to the sub-elite stratum of literacy. This is a sociologically ‘realistic’ form of literacy in the sense that it mirrors the marginalised status of the community in which it occurs. It is a form of literacy that characterises the place in which they operate, and in which access to elite (hyper-normative, homogenised) literacy is severely restricted.

Thus, because teachers, themselves, make particular errors in writing, owing to their restricted literacy development, they do not recognise these features as errors in their pupils’ written work. They ascribe it to the marginalised space within

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which the community lives and see it as a form of creative adaptation to a situation where significant changes in community literacy levels either do not happen or happen very slowly. Blommaert et al. (2005: 393) offer the following reason for their conclusion regarding these teachers’ literacy development: The teachers in Wesbank High all belonged to the same ‘racial’ groups as their pupils: coloured and black. And even if, in comparison with their pupils, they would be relatively well-off (they are a salaried professional lower middle-class), being black or coloured equalled structural disenfranchisement until very recently. The Wesbank High teachers, in other words, come from a similar sub-elite stratum in society, in which the material and symbolic privileges of the elite were and are rare commodities.

Here the reader is reminded of the historical background of South Africa – the structural disenfranchisement of its Black and Coloured population until 1994 – making elite literacies, especially in the two former official languages, English and Afrikaans, almost unattainable to the vast majority of the country’s population. However, it should be noted that there were differences in the degree of disenfranchisement suffered by Blacks and Coloureds, with Coloureds having marginally more benefits than Blacks, who were most affected by apartheid. This aspect creates special challenges for the schools in Wesbank, where most teachers are Coloured. They may not have much insight into the realities of the Black pupils, separated as some of them may be from these children in terms of home language, the areas they inhabit, their social class, and so forth. Justification for the use of peripheral normativity is offered by Blommaert et al. (2005: 396): Even though, from one perspective, it amounts to lifting “errors” to the level of norms (and thus “normalising” errors in writing), another perspective suggests that it offers interesting pedagogical opportunities and is thus a productive, positive procedure. It can be seen as the localisation of education standards – something which probably occurs everywhere (e.g. all over the world, English is learned with an accent), but is rarely recognised and acknowledged. Education, certainly on literacy, is very often seen as developing with reference to indisputable and a-contextual codes and norms. What happens in Wesbank High is the “downscaling” of education, bringing it down to the level of the local or regional community, borrowing its norms and expectations, and training pupils in the local(ised) codes and norms. The norms in Wesbank High are used to include, not just to exclude.

They, therefore, argue that by downscaling education to the level of the local Wesbank community, teachers are practising inclusive instead of exclusive education, and localising their practices to meet local needs rather than needs ‘out there’. The argument would be that these teachers are doing their best with the resources available to them and the pupils that they have and that this should be seen as both positive and productive.

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The authors conclude by linking Wesbank to Appadurai’s ‘vernacular globalisation’ together with the dynamics of exclusion and marginalisation. According to Appadurai (1996: 10), vernacular globalisation can be found in heterogeneous neighbourhoods, resulting in complex and unclear forms of locality, with the destabilisation and decentring of norms that operate with a large degree of autonomy in such neighbourhoods, outside the censure of state institutions like the education system. While, as has been noted above, this may be effective in solving local problems such as constructing an ‘adequate learning environment’, it cannot solve problems outside such spaces, especially in the more fortunate areas that enjoy much higher standards of housing, education, healthcare, and so forth. As the authors (Blommaert et al., 2005: 399) contend: What counts as “good English” in the township may be “bad English” at region or state level … the issue is the mobility offered by semiotic resources such as language skills: some skills offer a very low degree of mobility while others offer a considerably larger degree of mobility and transferability across social and spatial domains. “Standard” literacy usually falls in the second category, while “non-standard” literacy falls in the first category, even if from one perspective it can be seen as “full”, developed, complex literacy within a restricted repertoire of literacy skills and resources.

The type of errors typical of peripheral normativity which were identified by the research team in both the pupils and teachers’ use of English included the following (Blommaert et al. 2005: 386): (i) the erratic use of capitals; (ii) difficulties in singular and plural marking; (iii) difficulties with verb inflexion, especially tense marking; (iv) problems with the use of definite and indefinite articles; (v) a wide range of spelling errors, mostly as a result of acoustic writing (writing according to pronunciation); (vi) a tendency to aestheticise writing, even while struggling with basic writing skills; and (vii) pupils had specific problems with completing relatively undemanding syntactic and grammatical tasks in English. While the team argued that the above-mentioned errors occurred regardless of the languages used by pupils and their teachers, this chapter argues that in the teachers’ writing it occurred largely in English, but not in isiXhosa and Afrikaans. In the lessons that were observed, these teachers were particularly robust in speaking the standard varieties of a language and did not allow non-standard mixing and blending in the classroom by the learners.

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Despite limited access to English, these Wesbank High learners all held overwhelmingly positive attitudes towards English as the language providing greater access to higher education and better careers. When asked to write about the relative importance of each of the main languages in Wesbank, the results showed that for both Afrikaans and Xhosa pupils, English as an index of spatial-social mobility, had the highest instrumental value, although loyalty to the individual mother tongues still remained (Dyers, 2004; 2006). The following examples illustrate their attitude toward English: It helps me to communicate with others. It’s important to find work It will change my life by leading me to employment. I feel very good about English. Xhosa is my home language and is good for me and my culture. About English I feel like a White man, rich and not poor … I can say this language is the best. I can’t go anywhere without English. It is important to use it overseas. English is the no.1 language for communication. English is important because there are so many languages here in South Africa we need to understand each other so we can communicate in English.

These pupils, therefore, regarded English as a prestige language that they had to attain as a way of escaping poverty and unemployment. One pupil even equated mastery of English with being White and rich, which may be his response to the fact that many Black people who have ‘made it’ in the new South Africa are often seen to be highly proficient speakers of English. Perfect proficiency in standard English however, did not seem to matter to these pupils – only their adherence to the ideology of placing English at the top of the hierarchy of languages in South Africa. The struggle with the standard code: Afrikaans language classes observed Die Afrikaanse juffrou ve’dydelik nie soe lekker soesie Engelse een nie. Die ve’dydelikings in Engels is makliker. Die meneer maak dit makliker. Ek hou meer van Engels as vak as Afrikaans eerste taal. Die juffrou praat mos soes in sywer Afrikaans - soes Sewende Laan se mense praat, soe. [The Afrikaans teacher doesn’t explain as nicely as the English one does. The explanations in English are easier. The (male) teacher makes it easier. I like English as a subject more than Afrikaans First Language. The (female) teacher talks pure Afrikaans – just like the people speak in ‘7de Laan’ (a popular local, mainly Afrikaans, TV soap opera)].

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In this quotation from an interview with a Wesbank High learner, we see the unique challenges and contradictions inherent in the teaching of Afrikaans and English to pupils who mix and blend these languages in their daily use, as was apparent in earlier chapters. The (Coloured) Afrikaans teacher, the pupil claims, speaks a kind of ‘sywer’ (pure) Afrikaans which her pupils do not appreciate, as it is not the variety of Afrikaans they identify with or use on a daily basis. However, this teacher (a university graduate who majored in Afrikaans) is trying to teach Afrikaans in accordance with what she has learned from her training, her resources (the coursebooks in standard Afrikaans and the syllabus setting out very clearly what should be taught and how it should be done) and her own sense of what standard Afrikaans is in terms of grammar, style, lexicon and pronunciation. During the lessons, we observed that the teacher only used standard Afrikaans and gave the pupils plenty of models of standard Afrikaans writing, which they were required to copy into their notepads. Much of the class time, in fact, was devoted to her writing on the blackboard and the pupils copying what she was writing. She admitted that keeping them busy in this way ensured that disciplinary problems were kept to a minimum. Outside the classroom, the teacher continued to address the pupils in what some of them called ‘skoon’ (pure) Afrikaans, but within the environment of the staffroom, she relaxed and spoke Kaaps to her Afrikaans colleagues. Thus the teacher was quite comfortable in using one variety for her informal interactions and another for teaching. She did so even though the standard variety was seen as having little real currency in most of her pupils’ lives unless they were taken up in those facets of the national economy led by companies with a distinct Afrikaans identity, or aspired to study at an Afrikaans-medium university. The differences between the informal and formal variety of Afrikaans occur mainly in the lexical and phonological features, but not at the syntactic level. The main feature of non-standard Afrikaans is the frequent, often unmarked code-switching that is typical of Kaaps. Although even its own speakers acknowledge the low status of this variety, it is clear from the interview extract at the start of this section that there is still considerable negativity about what is perceived as standard Afrikaans among these pupils, which is far removed from the variety they speak in their homes. They may also have inculcated the attitudes of their parents, who grew up in the period of separate development when standard Afrikaans was associated with a repressive and racist government (Malan, 1996). Another interesting aspect of the quotation introducing this section is that the pupil found the English language teacher’s explanations, probably replete with the type of peripheral normativity discussed in the previous section, far more accessible, leading to this pupil preferring English First Additional Language over Afrikaans Home Language class.

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In the past, language was an important site and tool for perpetrating apartheid era inequities in education within schools, and it is clear that such inequities have not truly been overcome, given the gulf between the Afrikaans teacher’s use of standard Afrikaans and the linguistic resources of the pupils. The language of learning and teaching in schools, therefore, has massive ramifications for the access to knowledge afforded by different varieties – a vital issue in a country struggling to provide quality education for all. The irony was that despite such contradictions in terms of how they experienced the Afrikaans language classes, all the pupils fostered very positive attitudes towards Afrikaans in its broadest sense, particularly as a marker of identity. Immediately apparent from the extracts quoted below, is that they underscore the arguments about the peripheral normativity operating in Wesbank High, given the many errors these pupils made in their writing, as can be seen from the highlighted words, phrases and incorrect punctuation. There is a large degree of overlap between the errors indicated by Blommaert et al. (2005) in the pupils’ English and Afrikaans language usage. The pupils’ comments on Afrikaans came from a more personal and sentimental perspective and can be categorised as follows: 1. As the language they were raised in and which is an integral part of their group identity: Ek kies Afrikaans want ek is groot geword met Afrikaans. My ma, pa en helle familie praat Afrikaans. Dis bilankerik want meestal mense praat Afrikaans in ons skool. [I  choose Afrikaans because I was raised in it. My mother, father and whole family speak Afrikaans. It is important because most people at our school speak Afrikaans]. Afrikaans moet in Suid-Afrika bly van dit is deel van wie ons is. [Afrikaans must stay in South Africa, because it is part of who we are]. Afrikaans van die Kleurling verstaan nie die ander taal nie. [The Coloured people only understand their Afrikaans and not the other language.]

2. As the language they found easiest to use: Want meeste van die mense praat Afrikaans en sekere van die mense wil vir Hulle mooi Hou oor die taal wat Hulle praat. [Because most of the people speak Afrikaans and some of the people want to keep the language they speak pure.] Ek kies Afrikaans omdat dit my eerste Taal is. [I choose Afrikaans because it is my first language.]

3. As a language of power in the Western Cape Province: Afrikaans kan tweede kom want die meerderheid van die mense in die Westelike Provinsie praat dit. [Afrikaans can come second (to English) because it is spoken by the majority of the people in the Western Cape Province]. Afrikaans want dit is baie belangrik vir my om gou ‘n werk te kan kry en baie van die mense kan Afrikaans praat. [Afrikaans, because it is very important for me to find work quickly, and many people can speak it].

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These comments refer mainly to the role of Afrikaans as an index of their group and ethnic identity, and to a lesser degree, its continuing power in the Western Cape. However, as with the responses to English in the previous sub-section of this chapter, the contradiction between positive attitudes and actual language proficiency was also present in their written responses to Afrikaans, which revealed sharp contrasts in terms of the pupils’ standards of literacy or command of standard Afrikaans. While at least a third could communicate effectively in fairly clear, coherent Afrikaans, many struggled with spelling and punctuation. Their writing simply reflected the way in which they spoke, in their colloquial variant of Afrikaans, and often their handwriting was barely legible. This can be seen clearly if a comparison is made between the pupils’ writing and the standard Afrikaans versions of their sentences. Two examples taken from the three categories listed above will suffice: 1. Ek kies Afrikaans want ek is groot geword met Afrikaans. My ma, pa en helle familie praat Afrikaans. Dis bilankerik want meestal mense praat Afrikaans in ons skool”. Standard Afrikaans: Ek verkies Afrikaans want ek is grootgemaak in Afrikaans. My ma, pa en hele familie praat Afrikaans. Dis belangrik want meeste mense praat Afrikaans in ons skool. 2. Want meeste van die mense praat Afrikaans en sekere van die mense wil vir Hulle mooi Hou oor die taal wat Hulle praat”. (Note the unnecessary capitalisation). Standard Afrikaans: Want meeste mense praat Afrikaans en sekere mense wil die taal wat hulle praat suiwer hou. The peripheral normativity in these pupil’s’ command of standard Afrikaans, which differs significantly from that of their teacher, has many causes. There are the literacy practices in the home and community, where access to reading material in the standard code is severely restricted, as noted in chapters 3 and 4. The varieties of Afrikaans spoken in Wesbank will undoubtedly also impact their command of the standard code – no one wants to ‘sound posh’ in a working-class neighbourhood unless there is some reward for standing out because of your language proficiency. However, an area that requires greater attention is the historical separation of a very large group of speakers of Afrikaans from what became White or standard Afrikaans in the early 20th century – a separation that remains in place to this day despite the conciliatory actions of many Afrikaans organisations. The isiXhosa classes observed In the isiXhosa Home Language classes (Wesbank High, during the time of our research, only offered these to Xhosa pupils), teachers were particularly strict on the use of ‘isiXhosa only’. For example, during a grammar class, a pupil responded

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with ‘potatoes’ when asked to identify this vegetable on a poster. Although the pupil correctly identified the vegetable (but not in the target language), the teacher ignored her answer and repeated the question to the class until one pupil eventually answered iitapile – borrowed from the Afrikaans word aartappels – instead of the standard isiXhosa word amazambane. The pupil who had given the English noun thereafter remained silent for the rest of the lesson. Such silencing strategies might seem to teachers like effective strategies to get to the answers they actually want but also lead to pupils losing their desire to participate in classroom activities. Nearly all the Xhosa respondents interviewed by us complained that the isiXhosa they learned at school was ‘too difficult’. It is not surprising that so many Xhosa pupils struggle to express themselves in standard isiXhosa. It is worth remembering that while White and Coloured children can expect to be educated in their mother tongues up until the end of their secondary school education and beyond, Black children are still required to switch to English after the first four years of schooling. Mother tongue bilingual education, which was accepted in principle by the Western Cape Education Department (WCED, 2002), is still far from becoming a reality for these children. When our research started at Wesbank High in 2003, we discovered that the school accommodated many pupils from the other Black townships in Cape Town, and all of them were placed, with the tacit support of their parents, in the English Home Language stream, even though they often had an extremely limited command of the language. At that stage, provision had not yet been made for isiXhosa language classes at the school. These only commenced in 2005. Nevertheless, as with the Afrikaans first language speakers, the attitudes of these Xhosa pupils towards their home language or mother tongue displayed a proud loyalty towards the language as the bearer of their culture and identity: isiXhosa sibaluleke ngoba Ndikhule umama wam No tata wam besi thetha Nam Ndiya Ngwenela andinga si yeki Mku sithetha. [isiXhosa is important because it is the language of my parents and I don’t want to stop speaking it.] IsiXhosa sibaluleke ngokuba Umntu wesixhosa abazi ngoba awunokwazi ukuba Uthi Ungumxhosa phakathi kwabanye abaxhosa Ube Uthethaelinye ilwimi luhlazo kuthi oko. [A Xhosa person must know his/her language or it is a disgrace.] IsiXhosa sabalulekile kubantubamaxhosa ngo xasisenza amasiko siye sithethi isiXhosa sethu esisifumana emabeleni oomamabethu, xasithe tha ezilwimi ziminzi abazali bethu, abakhulu abasiva. [Xhosa is important to the Xhosa-speaking people because they use it when doing their customs and the elders do not know the other languages.] isiXhosa sibalulekile ngokuba naso lulwimi olusetyenziswayo apha emningizini Africa naso ke sibulelekile sifundwe ngabanye abantu balapha emningizimAfrica. [Xhosa is important because it is one of the South African languages, people have to learn it.]

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The examples above have similar errors to those in the writing samples in isiXhosa commented on in Chapter 2, revealing the influence of the urban vernacular, as well as the absence of sustained formal isiXhosa language learning. As with the Afrikaans teacher, the isiXhosa teacher strove to teach standard isiXhosa, and tried to enforce a strict classroom regime of ‘pure’ isiXhosa, but with mixed results. Like the Afrikaans population of Wesbank, the Xhosa population speak different varieties of isiXhosa, depending on where they migrated from, and these varieties may be very different from the standard variety taught in school, so that these isiXhosa pupils may feel the same sense of alienation from the standard variety as their fellow Afrikaans pupils. The literacies practised in the home, as with the Afrikaans pupils, is another important factor, and finding isiXhosa reading materials is even more difficult than finding it in Afrikaans. Conclusion What is the value of standard English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa in Wesbank? While there are families who do not speak blended varieties (including recent adult migrants from Eastern and Northern Cape), we observed that hybrid languaging practices soon begin to influence the speech patterns of their children. There are also those who prefer the standard variety, and they worry about the environmental influences on their children’s ability to maintain what they see as ‘good’ and ‘pure’ Afrikaans or isiXhosa. However, our research in Wesbank has shown that standard varieties appear to have value only in the classroom and in elite domains outside the township which these marginalised pupils may never access. Blommaert et al. (2005: 399) include the following stark footnote from Blommaert (2005b): People from peripheral regions in the world enter economies of language and literacy in which they—to put it bluntly—do not stand a chance. Many phenomena that are captured under the term “misunderstanding” are, consequently, effects of structural inequality in Globalisation.

I believe that standardised varieties play a vital role in education, literature, international communication and any other area where there is limited understanding of alternative dialects of the same linguistic system. This is despite the problematic nature of the way in which Christian missionaries produced the first written versions of South Africa’s indigenous languages (usually based on only one variety) which have remained part of standard isiXhosa, Sesotho, and so forth. However, there needs to be a greater understanding of the almost arbitrary manner in which certain varieties were chosen for standardisation. Standard varieties should at all times remain open systems, ready to be changed and adapted in accordance with what users are really

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doing with language. The longer it takes to welcome the actual language repertoires of pupils to the classroom, the greater the estrangement and even hostility will be between these pupils and the standard varieties. By acknowledging what the child brings to the classroom, we strengthen their self-image as their own language varieties become integrated into their education. A final word on the value of peripheral normativity in English, as practised in Wesbank, comes from Blommaert et al. (2005: 400) who contend that in the English classes they observed “an unattainable English-as-the-language of success … transformed into an attainable resource, lowering the threshold of access while maintaining its status, appeal and perceived transferability into upward and outward trajectories”.

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Becoming a Channel for Voices from the Periphery: The Role of the Socially Responsible Sociolinguist

Introduction Chapter 9 considers the discourses from the Wesbank community which my team and I uncovered and analysed – the ones we were particularly interested in within our disciplinary constraints, and the other discourses we either failed to identify or uncovered too late and which we could have addressed as responsible, socially aware academic researchers. The question I hope to answer in conclusion to this book is: What are the duties of the socially responsible sociolinguist when carrying out community research? The drive to uncover discourses of hope South Africa’s relatively peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy undoubtedly left its mark on the ideological orientations of the research team working in Wesbank. In analysing the discourses collected, we were motivated to uncover discourses of hope as evidence that a fractured society was healing and that the migrant population of the township was finding ways of co-existing peacefully and productively in this space. In this section, I will draw on three of the research studies which provided findings pointing towards the possible emergence of a better society slowly taking shape in Wesbank. With the ethnolinguistic tensions between Coloured and Black South Africans during the 1994 elections still fresh in our minds, we were pleased to discover a small group of cross-linguistic, cross-cultural families in Wesbank. We believe that these families (approximately 10% of the township’s total population) are an example of what a truly integrated community could look like, especially in terms of their multilingual language practices. The findings from our work with these families, as discussed in Chapter 7, put particular emphasis on how the younger family members comfortably transition between different languages or codes in these families. Their teachers saw them as more open and empowered as a result of their much richer linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Being multilingual and multicultural were seen as important

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components of becoming ‘ideal’ South Africans, and teachers believed that such young people could contribute meaningfully to racial tolerance and harmony in the township. A second study which pointed to positive signs of emerging voice and agency among some women in Wesbank, was the study on portable multiliteracies (Dyers & Slemming, 2014), as discussed in Chapter 4. Some of the portable literacies we uncovered were multimodal, financial, community navigational, religious, organisational and literacies of the self – the ability to speak and even write about themselves and their needs with confidence in order to access possible avenues of assistance towards a better life. A third study underlined a significant, often underrated factor contributing to literacy acquisition and development in Wesbank families. Most households have at least one cellular telephone (Blommaert & Velghe, 2012), and mastering this technology is considered as essential, even by the elderly. Research by Dyers (2014) and Blommaert and Velghe (2012) has shown that much of the informal acquisition of literacy among older women takes place through everyday socialising in real and virtual space with peers, as well as younger people. The use of cellular telephones appears to have played a significant role in such literacy acquisition. Blommaert and Velghe (2012: 6) note that even “people with modest means manage to take part in the new communication environment”. These studies and others, carried out in Wesbank, actively searched for positive aspects of community life in the township. However, a re-examination of our data revealed some of the real issues facing members of the community. We discovered that, even with an intention to adopt an ethno-methodological approach, our sensitivities remained shaped by the mandate and description of the overarching research project. The discourses either ignored or uncovered too late After 24 years of the democratic dispensation, post-apartheid South Africa remains engaged in a number of macro-discourses relating to current and future socio-political developments in the country. As was already argued in Chapter 5, it is also vitally important to pay attention to those micro-discourses and common worldviews of ordinary people as they attempt to put their key issues across in whatever voice they can manage. Typically, such discourses may not be seen as significant to researchers who are only interested in the outcomes of their own research. In this subsection, I wish to highlight some of the discourses in Wesbank to which my research team should have been far more attentive. In 2007, our team carried out the second of two large-scale surveys to determine both literacy and skill levels in different parts of Wesbank. We involved senior phase primary school pupils from Wesbank No. 1 Primary School in a Life Orientation

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homework project in which they were required to collect data on the available skills in their families, using a trilingual set of questions in English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa which we had prepared for them. The responses that we focused on were levels of education and the types of occupational training the adults had undergone. Most of the parents surveyed had completed or partly completed primary school in some of the feeder towns for the Wesbank community. The survey largely reflected a population with incomplete education, with the children in these families generally doing better than their parents. Focused as we were on the skills audit, we chose to ignore a sentence scribbled on many of the forms that the pupils returned to us. The sentence read (in various forms), “As ons die voordeur oopmaak en toemaak, val die sement af’ [When we open and close the front door, cement falls down]. The position of this seemingly arbitrary scribble – right at the top of the form – was also ignored by us. In hindsight, we realise that those who wrote this sentence hoped that we would either report or publicise how badly their Reconstruction and Development (RDP) houses had been built. Another important project analysed the daily journals kept by Wesbank women as part of their literacy training while attending a training course in domestic service, as discussed earlier. In these journals, they reflected on the experience of leaving the township daily to attend the course in a more pleasant environment, leaving behind their situations of poverty and male dominance, as well as their hopes for the future. Having obtained their permission to use their daily journals as research data, we analysed the discourses in these journals using Appraisal Theory (White, 1998; 2000). Here is one discourse that we picked up only a year later when the Appraisal data analysis was in full swing: Table 9.1

Extract from Table 5.2

W13: … nou begin hy met my kind skel, sê ek sal nie kos koop nie want jy is nie my kind nie nou gee ek miskien antwoord dan slat hy my blou oë slat my met hamers en slat my kind … [… now he starts to scold my child, saying I won’t buy food because you are not my child; and if I maybe give an answer then he hits me leaving me with blackened eyes. He uses hammers to beat me and he hits my child …].

Explicit negative judgement of boyfriend’s violent behaviour coupled with inserted extra-vocalisation/inter-textual positioning from the boyfriend (in bold font).

This woman was using her journal to speak out, in a safe and controlled space, about the abuse she and her child were suffering from at the hands of her boyfriend. The fact that she was willing for us to use her journal was indicative of the fact that this may very well have been ‘a cry for help’ which we failed to pick up on.

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Here are two more examples which emerged almost casually in the course of doing research in this space. A high school scholar being interviewed in the third year of the project suddenly added this statement to his discussion of his parents’ jobs: Umama unesifo seswekile nalo ke ulwazi endinalo. [My mother is diabetic.]

Yet, on the transcribed interview, the student researcher simply carries on with her questions regarding this scholar’s degree of multilingualism, instead of acknowledging and responding to his statement. On another occasion, one senior citizen who was part of a group of respondents in a project on how people with incomplete education could negotiate township signage, tried to engage me in the problems he had with his children. His story hinted at possible elder abuse, but since my focus was on obtaining certain information, I merely listened politely and then returned to the data collection at hand. Why are these discourses as significant as the more positive ones we were so keen to celebrate? It has to be acknowledged that the post-apartheid state’s constitutional commitment to rights like equality and dignity are being negated by the living conditions of a large number of South Africans. Academic researchers, therefore, have no choice but to be more responsive to all the discourses emanating from research communities, instead of maintaining a myopic focus on particular research aims only. People in peripheral communities in South Africa feel that they are not being heard on the issues that affect them directly and they actively seek to engage those they see as having the education, authority and indeed the voice to either report their issues to the relevant authorities or to offer some form of direct assistance. If they cannot find anyone to listen and respond to their issues, the result is often angry service delivery protests directed at embattled municipalities. Conclusion: What is the socially responsible sociolinguist to do? In conclusion, this brings me to an attempt to answer my key question on community research and the responsible, responsive sociolinguist. Undoubtedly, there is a dire need to move away from focusing in an almost technicist sense on data analysis in the privacy of researchers’ homes and offices, in order to become more responsive to different calls for help in communities. Although our many research projects fed some skills and even money into the Wesbank community and the overall economy of the township we also needed to be far more self-critical of the ways in which we fell back on our tried and trusted ways of obtaining data and analysing the various discourses, “as [a] object to be collected and processed away from where it is practised” (Iedema & Carroll, 2010: 1). Effective community-based research also means taking the findings of one’s research back to the community and evaluating their responses to the initial results. This was only really achieved in the last years of the project when there was a much greater awareness of the importance of sharing these findings with the very people that

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produced the data. Thus Velghe (2014) and Dyers (2014) were able to show their key informants their draft papers containing their discourses and to check whether they were satisfied with the ways in which these were reported on in the papers. In both cases, fortunately, informants were delighted to see their (anonymously reported) thoughts and views in print. However, it should be possible to test the validity of research findings at an even earlier stage – even immediately after interviewing and observing community members - and always making them aware of their rights as research participants, such as the right to informed consent, to anonymity, and to withdraw themselves and their data from the research project at any stage. In addition, every research team should include at least one person who pays attention to the odd bits of data that do not seem to relate to the research questions, but rather to issues of concern for the community. It should be possible for such a researcher to respond immediately to these ‘cries for help’, by tactfully withdrawing the producers of such discourses to a more private space and asking them about these particular statements. Members of the Wesbank research population saw us with our advanced levels of education as sufficiently empowered and agentive to do something about their immediate concerns and to be their voices to those in power. I would therefore argue that in the current context of a South Africa battling multiple social ills, the sociolinguist needs to be more responsive, to take issues to the press, the city authorities and Parliament, becoming, in manageable ways, a lobbyist for the community. Going on this path is fraught with difficulties, but at the same time far more responsive to the challenging world of community research. Universities have the resources and many experts in diverse fields who could advise and assist communitybased researchers on a range of issues. Indeed, sending out interdisciplinary teams into communities would yield much richer findings and contribute to academic research not simply ending up in multiple journals and books read by specialist audiences, but actually being of direct relevance to the communities whose voices shape such research. At the centre of such interdisciplinary research should be the socially responsive sociolinguist, whose work resonates with that of the historian, the geographer, the anthropologist, the psychologist, the sociologist, the political scientist and even the economist in order to make sense of what Blommaert (2011) terms ‘the most visible sign of social change’ – language.

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Afterword: Towards Equal Multilingualisms Quentin Williams

The Semiotics of New Spaces: Languaging and Literacies in one South African township is far from just a narrative, analysis and description of the language and literacy practices in one of South Africa´s first post-apartheid townships. It documents the years Charlyn Dyers spent conducting research, in order to understand the daily rhythms and struggles of racialised, working-class multilingual speakers. During this time, I had the privilege of accompanying her to the research site and experience first-hand the materially and linguistically rich literacy resources of the township’s multilingual residents. I also witnessed the linguistic strategies that resemble a type of equal multilingualism that challenges the monologic and structural-functional view of multilingualism. In my book, Remix Multilingualism: Hip Hop, Ethnography and Performing Marginalized Voices (Williams, 2017), I argue for the transformative power of multilingualism, suggesting that we explore and further investigate how unequally available (schooled) multilingualism is to some members of South Africa’s multilingual communities, and how multilingualism seems to continue to privilege certain speakers. The unequal distribution, I further argued, has the intended and unintended effect of placing constraints on the exercise of linguistic agency and voice. Furthermore, multilingual speakers caught up in the economic and political web of such distribution, historically, find it continuously difficult to realise their multilingual practices in both private and public spaces. As Dyers’ research clearly demonstrates throughout this book, this has been the case for multilingual speakers in Wesbank. Although the township represents a rich multilingual environment, it is still hampered by linguistic, literacy and economic legacies that perpetuate the myth of equal multilingualism, even though there has always been an unequal distribution of multilingualism across linguistic landscapes and in institutional settings. Rarely is the following question asked: how do we achieve equal multilingualisms in a township space such as Wesbank, and indeed all other multilingual spaces in South Africa? The Semiotics of New Spaces provides the first answers to that question.

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Swept up in the post-1994 transformation’s rhetoric and utopian promises, the research participants provides us with unique insights into how they treat language, and indeed multilingualism, and how they respond to the politics of social transformation and economic inclusion to manage their daily lives. Dyers demonstrates, through close analysis, that Wesbank is a raciolinguistic diverse township inhabited by cross-cultural and cross-linguistic families not only making ends meet but tapping into their multilingual communication translinguistic features to shape and transform language attitudes. In a mainly working-class community, Dyers also illustrates how in Wesbank, mature speakers navigate literacy practices, the linguistic landscape and how for every multilingual speaker voice and agency are crucial “markers of a developing participatory citizenship” (p. 3) (my italics for emphasis). This emphasis on participatory citizenships also informs about the participant’s performing of acts of linguistic citizenship – crucial vectors in understanding how multilingual speakers tie their linguistic voice and agency to equal multilingualisms (Stroud, 2009). According to Stroud (2008: 45), focusing on linguistic citizenship helps to develop our understanding of the politics underlying the sociolinguistic complexity of language issues. In every chapter in this book, we see acts of linguistic citizenship as participatory citizenship illustrated through various events and activities such as language, literacy, language markets, and the practice of identity and voice – what it takes for multilingual speakers to build a community, educational institutions and live up to state language policies if the point of departure is equal multilingualisms. The Semiotics of New Spaces – Languaging and Literacy Practices in one South African Township, brings together a powerful conceptual framework from sociolinguistics: peripheral normativity; truncated multilingualism; portable multiliteracies; and language attitudes and ideologies. Dyers applies these concepts and brings forward how equal multilingualisms operate on a semiotic level, on “scales of ability … ranging from complexity and ‘completeness’ to more truncated versions – cut off at a particular stage of development owing to various factors such as access to education, location, poverty, dimensions of power, socio-political developments, and so on” (p. 3). I think Dyers would agree that the emphasis here is not so much on ability than on access if we are to achieve equal multilingualisms. Armed with the concepts mentioned above, Dyers demonstrates how, across the locality of Wesbank, multilingual and literacy resources are distributed, taken up and reflected upon, in not only the mobility of the speakers of the community but in the establishment of the material landscape. We also see, based on instrumental and integrative attitudes, how speakers manage the multilingual space of the township. The analysis of the multilingual and literacy practices of the participants is not framed through monolingualism. Rather, Dyers illustrates the translingual shifts that come about through translocal migration (not necessarily toward English,

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which is often a given), for a better, more humane life: an experience readily faced by Black, Coloured and foreign migrant who find themselves in townships, but toward a multilingualism that challenges monolingual ideologies and the pathology attached to multilingual speakers in townships. The township’s multilingual inhabitants live there out of necessity, but aspire to move out of such places to improve their circumstances. It is for this reason that they are constantly on the move. Dyers demonstrates that the translocal movement of people to townships, and outward, holds significant implications for the practice of multilingualism and literacy. Multilingualism more often than not becomes the commodity drawn on to not only tap into local networks, but allow speakers to develop a sense of pride and belonging, when they use newly acquired codes, styles and registers. In Wesbank, speakers of Afrikaans, isiXhosa and foreign languages share in multilingual practices and resources developed in the township, which hold significant implications for how we understand their interpretation of their language shifts and losses, and more importantly their multilingual voice and agency. Even more significant are the ways in which multilingual resources are fed into multilingual literacy practices and events, and in turn, begin to shape, as well as reshape multilingual ideologies. This book also shows how those literacy practices and events are gendered, particularly in the transfer of portable literacy skills. In a multilingual market such as Wesbank, it is often the ideas and practices behind languages like English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa, forged during colonialism and rigged up ideologically in apartheid, that seem to perpetuate the unequal distribution of multilingualisms. We can only achieve equality in a messy market, both for the individual and the community when, as Dyers incisively demonstrates, we focus on multilingual conviviality, the material landscapes, intense contact between registers and styles of speech and the performance of truncated multilingualism. The multilingual speakers of Wesbank are faced daily with the fact that in the end their mobility will be constrained by poverty, violence, malnutrition and unemployment – all features of ‘advanced marginality’ (Wacquant, 2008). Be that as it may, The Semiotics of New Spaces – Languaging and Literacy Practices in one South African Township brings into focus the complexity of marginalised voices on the margins of society. While Wesbank is already a marginalised township space, it is nevertheless a resource for those multilingual speakers looking to alter their future, whether through multilingualism or other material means. It is in such alteration on the margins where the struggle for voice ensues, where to en-voice (giving voice) is performed. It is in this struggle for en-voicing, that Dyers challenges us as sociolinguists and researchers generally interested in the study of multilingualism, literacy and practice in township spaces, to reflect carefully on our role, status and positionality in relation to the community we ask permission to enter for research purposes, and to ask ourselves what is our social responsibility?

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By directing our attention to discourses of hope, Dyers lays out a familiar blueprint on how to more intensely consider the raciolinguistics of the township (Alim, Ball & Rickford, 2016), and how to move beyond a monolithic and monologic approach to multilingualisms and literacy in the township. Indeed, as Dyers demonstrates throughout the book, as a consequence of language contact and change one cannot talk about multilingualisms in the township in a narrow sense, if we want to move towards the equal distribution of multilingualisms. To that end, the multilingual community of Wesbank provides important insights into the lost opportunities for realising full participatory citizenship that is linguistic citizenship. Neoliberal economic transformation, in the macro sense, has left the township off the agenda, and by extension the economic, political and ideological plight of citizenship in such places. The further implication has been that many multilingual citizens living in townships, such as Wesbank, do not fully realise their linguistic agency, nor are their voices adequately heard. Some of the examples in this book reveal that the exercise of voice is multimodal and that what participants write and say is evidence of a daily struggle with voice that is tied not only to the care of a linguistic self, but very much the body. For example, a woman writing up her experience of domestic abuse in Afrikaans as a cry for help; a high school pupil reflecting in an interview, in isiXhosa, about the health issues of his mother; or the senior citizen reflecting on signage and providing intimate details about his domestic struggles. These issues are important to the speakers because as Dyers explains in Chapter 9: People in peripheral communities in South Africa feel that no-one is listening to them and the issues that affect them directly … [as a result] … they actively seek to engage those they see as having the education, authority and indeed the voice either to report on their issues to the relevant authorities or to offer some form of direct assistance.

Thus, the civic and activist lesson this book offers to sociolinguists in South Africa is that it takes more than armchair talk, popularised interviews or the occasional op-ed piece to take responsibility for our interpretations, arguments and theories regarding multilingualisms in township spaces. Indeed, if we are to go beyond the monolithic idea of multilingualism in the township we have to give adequate attention to what it means to be and become multilingual in township spaces. I agree with Dyers that there will always be, “a dire need to move away from focusing in an almost technicist sense on data analysis in the privacy of researchers’ homes and offices to become far more responsive to different calls for help in communities” (p. 124). I also agree that we have to become more public in our findings – “to be more responsive, to take issues to the press, the city authorities and Parliament, becoming, in manageable ways, a lobbyist for the community” (p. 125).

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Index

A Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) 51, 60, 62 Afrikaans 2‑3, 5‑6, 9, 13, 16, 19, 21‑23, 25‑37, 42‑49, 52, 64, 65, 71, 79, 80‑84, 86, 88‑90, 93, 95‑97, 101‑104, 106‑108, 110‑117, 123, 129, 130‑131 agency 1‑2, 20, 44, 53, 59, 60, 62‑64, 66, 68, 74‑75, 122, 127‑130 apartheid 1‑2, 6, 9, 10, 12‑16, 24, 29, 30, 32, 41, 54, 62‑64, 80, 82, 105, 110, 113, 121‑122, 124, 127, 129, Appraisal Theory 19‑20, 64, 67, 123 attitudes 1‑3, 5, 17, 19, 20‑21, 23, 27‑29, 32, 36, 41‑42, 45‑46, 49, 64, 67‑69, 72, 75, 83, 99, 104, 108, 111‑114, 116, 128

commonplace diversity 80‑83 conviviality 80‑84, 96, 129 cross-cultural 1, 2, 5, 79, 97‑98, 101, 103, 121, 128 cross-linguistic 1, 97‑98, 101‑103, 121, 128

D dialogic places 99‑100, 103 discourse 1, 5, 15, 18‑21, 42, 53‑55, 59, 63‑64, 66‑69, 75, 91, 96, 121‑125, 130 diversity 10‑11, 25, 33, 79, 80‑83, 142 domains 3, 21, 24, 30, 37, 90, 98‑99, 101‑106, 109, 111, 117

E

Bantu Education Act 29

emotion 31, 63‑64, 66, 68‑70, 74, 104, 106 ethno-methodological 2, 17, 22, 122

C

F

code-mixing 31, 46, 64 Coloured 6, 9, 11‑13, 16, 24‑25, 27, 30, 31‑33, 35‑36, 42‑43, 45‑46, 48, 64‑65, 71, 75, 80, 82‑83, 86, 88, 97, 101, 103‑105, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116, 121, 129

Flaaitaal 34, 138

B

G gangs 13‑15, 34, 47‑48, 81, 85

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THE SEMIOTICS OF NEW SPACES

H hybridity 5, 11, 47, 79, 101, 117

I identity 1‑2, 11, 14, 16–17, 21, 24‑26, 28, 31‑33, 37, 41, 46‑48, 54, 64‑65, 69, 70, 80, 96, 98‑99, 101, 104, 107, 113‑114, 116, 128 ideologies 3, 5, 15, 30, 41‑42, 45‑46, 48‑49, 70, 82, 101, 107‑108, 112, 128, 129 indigenous 29, 30, 117 intertextual 68,‑71 isiXhosa 3, 5‑6, 9, 11, 13, 19, 21, 23‑24, 27‑30, 33‑37, 42, 44‑49, 52, 64‑65, 79‑80, 82‑84, 89‑90, 96‑97, 101‑104, 106‑108, 111, 115‑117, 123, 129‑130

K Kaaps 31, 46, 83, 104, 113

L language home 9, 24‑30, 32, 35, 37, 65‑66, 82, 93, 95, 109, 110, 112, 116 maintenance 30, 32, 37, 105 practices 1‑3, 5, 14, 19, 24, 37, 41‑42, 47, 79, 94, 97, 100, 105, 121 shift 17, 24, 32, 37, 105 linguistic landscape 1‑2, 4‑5, 18, 48, 52, 54, 61, 79, 84, 86, 90, 128 markets 79

M marginality 15, 129 metrolingualism 100 migration translocal 9, 128 transnational 2, 4

150

mobility 10, 29, 32‑33, 41‑43, 45, 49, 53, 79, 111, 128‑129 multicultural 1‑2, 10, 37, 48, 54, 83, 96, 98, 102, 106, 121 multilingualism(s) 2‑5, 23, 29‑30, 41‑42, 55, 84‑85, 97, 100, 124, 127‑130 equal 5, 127‑128 truncated 3‑5, 79, 97‑101, 105‑106, 128‑129 multiliteracies 3‑4, 52, 54‑56, 84, 88, 96, 108, 128 portable 3‑4, 57, 122, 128

N New Literacy Studies (NLS) 41‑42, 137

P participant diaries 19, 66, 136 participatory citizens 51, 55 performative competence 100 peripheral community 12, 14 normativity 3‑5, 79, 87, 108‑111, 113‑115, 117, 128 townships 31

R race 13, 16, 24, 131, 141 repertoires 16, 21, 79‑80, 107‑109, 117

S scales 3, 10, 18, 23, 44, 53, 122, 128 Semiotics 1, 127‑129, social capital 46 sociolinguistics 1‑3, 10, 17‑18, 22, 41‑42, 53, 128 Static Maintenance Syndrome 29 superdiversity 24, 79

Index

T

V

texting 52, 53 translanguaging 47‑48, 101 translocation 34 Tsotsitaal 3, 34, 47, 99

vernacular 28, 30, 33‑35, 37, 98, 110, 116 voice 1‑2, 48, 53‑55, 60, 63‑66, 68, 70, 72, 74‑75, 99, 122, 124‑125, 127‑130

U

X

urban speech forms 30 vernaculars 30, 33‑35, 37, 116

xenophobic attacks 15, 47, 88 Xhosa 6, 13, 16, 21‑22, 24‑25, 27‑28, 33‑37, 42‑43, 45, 48, 65‑66, 71, 75, 80, 82‑83, 89, 96, 97, 101‑104, 109, 111‑112, 115‑116 Xhosalisation 89

151