Explaining the ordinary magic of stable African multilingualism in the Vaal Triangle region in South Africa

Abstract

The academic and public debates about language maintenance and language shift in the post-1994 South Africa distract attention from the more productive and important endeavour of explaining the nature of the multilingualism observed among users of African languages in urban contexts. An explanation for this phenomenon is offered here, based on evidence from a literature overview, data from a large-scale language repertoire survey conducted in 2010 in the Vaal Triangle region, as well as interview data collected from students who participated in the language repertoire survey and additional interviews with students who did not participate in the 2010 survey. The explanatory model is based on the sociolinguistic language mode of the society, the linguistic culture resulting from the language mode, a description of the motivations for language learning in this context and the resultant effects on the domains of language learning and proficiency aimed at in the different languages in the multilingual repertoires studied. The model provides an explanation for the widespread and stable multilingualism observed among the participants and it explains the observed gaps between South African multilingual language policies and the supposed lack of implementation lamented by language policy commentators.

Being English in multilingual South Africa

“…Grosjean (1998: 136) defines the notion of an individual's ‘language mode’ as ‘a state of activation of a bilingual's language and language processing mechanisms’. When this notion is extended to that of the language mode of a society, it could be defined ‘as the state of activation in the minds of individuals along a continuum ranging from monolingual to multilingual at a societal and individual level’ (Coetzee‐Van Rooy, 2014: 123–126). The evidence reported in this study indicates that being multilingual is viewed as the ordinary way of being, even in the case of English home language users in South Africa.…”

“…The open question at the end of the survey is analysed with Atlas.ti version 8. The analysis of the language repertoire survey data for participants of African home languages (Coetzee‐Van Rooy, 2012; 2014; 2016) and Afrikaans (Coetzee‐Van Rooy, 2013) as a home language were published elsewhere. The focus of this article is on the analysis of the language repertoires of the English home language participants that formed part of the longitudinal language repertoire study and that were not reported previously.…”

“…The language repertoires of speakers of African home languages and the specific role of English in those repertoires have been studied by, among others, Banda (2009), Busch (2010), Prah (2010), Slabbert and Finlayson (2000), and Van der Walt (2004). A stream of scholarship focused on the threat of English to replace the indigenous languages (De Klerk, 1999; Kamwangamalu, 2003), but more recent work indicates that the African home languages remain important in the repertoires of multilingual South Africans and that English does not seem to replace the home languages in the domain of cultural identity (Coetzee‐Van Rooy, 2012; 2014; Mesthrie, 2008; Prah, 2010). In studies of the language repertoires of African home language speakers in South Africa, a multilingual mindset is prominent where English plays specific roles as the language of education, business, and the entertainment industry.…”

Multilingualism and persistence in multiple language learning

“…In contexts of societal multilingualism and situations of linguistic and/or social duress, an ought‐to multilingual self can emerge (Henry, 2020; Liu, 2022). As Coetzee–Van Rooy (2014) has suggested, an ought‐to multilingual self can direct people to believe “that if they are not multilingual in this society, they do not ‘fit in,’ because well‐integrated citizens in this society are multilingual” (p. 124). In migration settings, multiple language learning can take place in similar conditions.…”