Motivation and Multilingualism in South Africa

Rooy, Susan Coetzee–Van

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-28380-3_23

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 37 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Wolff (2000) reports this attitude towards language choices as a uniquely African approach where a speaker selects the language of her/his interlocutor for conversation and does not insist on using her/his own strongest language as code for conversations. This attitude was reported for African home language participants in the language repertoire survey previously (Coetzee‐Van Rooy, 2019). What is unexpected is that this attitude is also prevalent among the English home language participants in the language repertoire study.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 69%

Being English in multilingual South Africa

Rooy

2020

World Englishes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The multilingual repertoires of African home language and bilingual Afrikaans‐English speakers in South Africa have been investigated comprehensively in the recent past. Less attention has been paid to the language repertoires of English home language speakers. Very little is known about the nature of their repertoires and their attitudes towards the languages in their repertoires. These Inner Circle users of English are immersed in a deeply multilingual Outer Circle society where most individuals know at least two languages and the majority of the citizens know more than four languages. The use of English as a home language is also expanding in this context. In this paper, the language repertoires of urban English home language students that participated in a longitudinal language repertoire survey and a group who created language portraits are examined with a view to understand the nature of their language repertoires better. The main finding is that being English in multilingual South Africa means to be at least bilingual with a multilingual mindset. English home language repertoires in South Africa therefore differ from English home language repertoires in Inner Circle contexts like the USA and Australia; and from Outer Circle contexts like Kenya.

show abstract

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 69%