Learning a Supervernacular: Textspeak in a South African Township

Blommaert, Jan; Velghe, F.

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-7856-6_8

Cited by 12 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…and was able to reply to such predictable and phatic questions by means of routine answers ('ek is bored' -'I am bored' -'ek is by die werk' -'I'm at work'). This way she could keep conversations going for a while; through the use of these phatic expressions, she managed to appear as a competent user of MXit and this apparently satisfied the requirements of interaction and her wish to be in touch with her social network (Blommaert and Velghe 2012). © Velghe and CMDR.…”

Section: Lindamentioning

confidence: 98%

‘Hallo hoe gaan dit, wat maak jy?’: Phatic communication, the mobile phone and coping strategies in a South African context

Velghe

2018

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This paper looks at the ways in which the mobile phone has become a means through which phatic communication is being expressed. More specifically, the paper shows how, in an impoverished community such as the Wesbank township in South Africa, phatic communication and 'maintaining a connected presence' are vital strategies of social networking. In a context of severe and desperate impoverishment, loneliness, chronic unemployment and boredom, the exchange of phatic communicational gestures such as a text message or a short phone call forms one of the many coping strategies that the residents in Wesbank employ to face up to the harsh conditions of poverty and insecurity.

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Section: Lindamentioning

confidence: 98%

‘Hallo hoe gaan dit, wat maak jy?’: Phatic communication, the mobile phone and coping strategies in a South African context

Velghe

2018

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“…4 Mobile phone penetration in South Africa is the highest on the African continent, standing well over 100 mobile phones per 100 inhabitants (ITU 2010a). This high uptake rate has been confirmed in Wesbank.…”

Section: Mobile Phones In Wesbankmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…MXIT is very cheap; a MXIT message costs 2 South African cents, compared to 70 South African cents for a text message. More info, see http://site.mxit.com 4. For a more detailed discussion on the ecology of mobile phone use in Wesbank, seeVelghe (2013).…”

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confidence: 98%

Literacy acquisition, informal learning and mobile phones in a South African township

Velghe

2013

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development: Full Papers -

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The uptake of mobile phones has been especially remarkable in the developing world. For the first time in history people at the bottom of the income pyramid can also take part in the telecommunication society. Mobile phones can play a unique role in reaching those who are outside the scope of formal or institutionalized schooling and open doors to out-of-school learning practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Wesbank, an impoverished community in Cape Town, we look at the (informal) learning practices "illiterate" and "low literate" women engage in, in an attempt to gain voice in new communicative realities by learning how to be(come) cell phone literate and at the different levels of competence this informal learning generates. The mobile phone has become a learning tool, nourishing learning practices in emerging "communities of practice" in which learning is a social activity in which anyone with any knowledge on mobile phones and mobile phone literacies becomes a potential tutor.

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“…These perturbations are not random but usually reflect the hegemony of US English and its culture, values and gestures, US digital technologies and global corporations, and indirectly of the international agencies and donors with whom they work (Watson, 1999). Even a handful of examples from Africa, from the Maghreb (Dodson et al 2013), Namibia (Le Roux, 1990;Semali & Tutaleni, 2014), West Africa (Rosenberg, 2011), East Africa (Halvorsen, 2008;Traxler & Leach 2006) and South Africa (Blommaert & Velghe, 2012;Lambrecht 2015;Jantjies & Joy, 2012), show the diversity and significance of these perturbations. Some authors identify this somewhat mildly as linguistic interference at work in Africa (Asino & Mushiba, 2015), meaning the malign dynamic in an African context between colonial/global languages and mother tongue languages, whilst another sees African mother tongue languages as already historically weakened, though possibly by the same underlying causes, (Ndemo 2014) In all events, the paper points out how the design of interfaces and interactions in messaging, voice recognition, gestural interfaces, skeuomorphic icons and auto-correction, amongst other features, all favour some languages, some dialects and some communities but not some others.…”

Section: Culture Language and Literacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning with mobiles: The Global South

Traxler

2018

Research in Comparative and International Education

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IntroductionOver the last twenty years, the author has worked as a researcher, developer and consultant in Africa and elsewhere in the developing contexts of the global South (all problematic terms to which we return later). In this time, he has written extensively but haphazardly as the opportunities, the perspectives, the stimuli and the thoughts have occurred. The current paper is an attempt to integrate and organise this body of work and provide a more secure and coherent platform for subsequent thinking, in particular, a secure and coherent platform for subsequent thinking in an open, inclusive and rigorous way about the potential for mobile technologies to improve the lives of people and communities outside currently privileged domains, outside the established hegemony of the mainstream. In working on this paper, it quickly became clear that the issues that seemed relevant to the global South were, perhaps unsurprisingly, recognisable in the global North and likewise, with different terminology and emphasis, the concerns of the global North resonated in the global South. We return to this later.In this time, various clusters of ideas have appeared and reappeared, including the impact, nature, practice and limitations of research, especially in relation to official policy and programmes; language, literacy, culture, epistemology and pedagogy; mobile and social digital technologies; inclusion, opportunity, empowerment and education; development, modernity, anecdote and crisis. These in effect form the headings of the current paper but an underlying challenge is their permeability, connectivity and interaction.The principal focus will be sub Saharan Africa (SSA) as this creates a clearer focus for the discussion (and incidentally creates a more direct point of contact with some fellow contributors). It also omits some confounding variables and the mess of contingent transient reality.We explore communities and conditions in the global South, mainly in sub Saharan Africa and those of marginal, nomadic or indigenous peoples elsewhere and we see education systems and educational technology being used, currently and historically, to co-opt and exploit them by a process of acculturation and identity transformation in the interests of the mainstream, the established and the powerful, and see this as the ongoing expression of historical forces of industrialisation, capitalism, modernity and the European Enlightenment.In a different work, we have argued that such forces also operate on non-traditional students in domestic English higher education and this has been part of a recent European political agenda (Traxler 2016a).

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Learning a Supervernacular: Textspeak in a South African Township

Cited by 12 publications

References 15 publications

‘Hallo hoe gaan dit, wat maak jy?’: Phatic communication, the mobile phone and coping strategies in a South African context

‘Hallo hoe gaan dit, wat maak jy?’: Phatic communication, the mobile phone and coping strategies in a South African context

Literacy acquisition, informal learning and mobile phones in a South African township

Learning with mobiles: The Global South

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