Resisting the coloniality of language through languaging and making of a multilingual ikhaya in South Africa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jmtp.26058Keywords:
Anglonormativity, coloniality of language, family language policy, family multilingualism, Indigenous multilingualism, southern epistemologies, translanguagingAbstract
Multilingualism as a consequence of transnational mobility and migration is prominent in studies of language socialization and family multilingualism in the Global North. While mobility within and between the various regions in South Africa sustains multilingualism and aligns with the global dynamic of mobility, Indigenous multilingualism is inherently the norm. The officiation of 11 named languages positions the country as linguistically diverse. However, dominant ideologies from the coloniality of language continue to reinforce the power of colonial languages while African languages used by numerical majorities remain marginalized, especially in high-status domains such as education. In this article, we present ethnographic data from a case study of a Xhosa multilingual family traversing between their urban (township) homes and the main family homestead in a rural setting. The family includes a child who attends a suburban historically whites-only English medium school. Reflecting on the non-hierarchical use of languages within their homes, or their languaging, we show how they use their linguistic/semiotic and spatial repertoires to make family as well as to resist the hierarchical positioning of the colonial languages, English and Afrikaans, above isiXhosa (prefix isi- indicates the language of Xhosa people) at school. Informed by Siqwana-Ndulo’s (1998) challenge to the Western idea of the nuclear family, our analysis demonstrates how family is distributed across kinship ties and households. We introduce the notion of ikhaya – the isiXhosa word for both family and home (see Molate, forthcoming) – as a useful southern concept for accounting for the expansive nature of family kinship systems in African families.
References
Anthonissen, C. and Stroud, C. (2022). Family time(s): Migrant temporalities in family language planning in the urban African south. In U. Røyneland and R. Blackwood (eds), Multilingualism across the lifespan (pp. 104–123). Routledge.
Blommaert, J. (2019). From groups to actions and back in online-offline sociolinguistics. Multilingua, 38(4), 485–493. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2018-0114
Bourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchange. Social Science Information, 16(6), 645–668.
Busch, B. (2012). The linguistic repertoire revisited. Applied Linguistics, 33(5), 503–523. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams056
Busch, B. (2017). Expanding the notion of the linguistic repertoire: On the concept of Spracherleben – the lived experience of language. Applied Linguistics, 38(3), 340–358. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amv030
Canagarajah, S. (2018). Translingual practice as spatial repertoires: Expanding the paradigm beyond structuralist orientations. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 31–54. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx041
Coetzee, F. (2018). ‘Hy leer dit nie hier nie (‘He doesn’t learn it here’): Talking about children’s swearing in extended families in multilingual South Africa’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 5(3), 291–305. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2018.1477291
Creswell, J. W. (2012). Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (4th ed.). Pearson.
Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2016). Conflicting language ideologies and contradictory language practices in Singaporean multilingual families. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7), 694–709. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2015.1127926
Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. and Lanza, E. (2018). ‘Language management in multilingual families: Efforts, measures and challenges’. Multilingua, 37(2), 123–130. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2017-0132
Dumanig, F. P., David, M. K. and Shanmuganathan, T. (2013). Language choice and language policies in Filipino-Malaysian families in multilingual Malaysia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 4(6), 582–596. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2013.784323
Fanon, F. (2017 [1952]). Black Skin, White Masks. Trans C. L. Markmann. Grove Press.
Gordon, S. and Harvey, J. (2019). South Africans prefer their children to be taught in English. The Conversation Africa, 30 September. Retrieved on 4 March 2023 from https://theconversation.com/south-africans-prefer-their-children-to-be-taught-in-english-124304
Gumperz, J. J. (1964). Linguistic and social interaction in two communities. American Anthropologist, 66(6), 137–153. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1964.66.suppl_3.02a00100
Guzula, X., McKinney, C. and Tyler, R. (2016). Languaging-for-learning: Legitimising translanguaging and enabling multimodal practices in third spaces. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 34, 211–226. https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2016.1250360
Gregory, E. and Ruby, M. (2011). The ‘insider/outsider’ dilemma of ethnography: Working with young children and their families in cross-cultural contexts. Journal of Early Childhood, 9(2), 162–174. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476718X10387899
Hall, K. and Richter, L. (2018). ‘Introduction: Children, families and the state’. South African Child Gauge 2018, 22–31.
Heugh, K. (2013). Multilingual education policy in South Africa constrained by theoretical and historical disconnections. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 33, 215–237. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190513000135
Higgins, C. (2019). Introduction: Language, heritage and family – a dynamic perspective. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 255(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2018-2001
Higgins, C. and Wright, L. (2022). Diversifying family language policy. In L. Wright and C. Higgins (eds), Diversifying family language policy (pp. 1–14). Bloomsbury.
Hua, Z. and Wei, L. (2016). Transnational experience, aspiration and family language policy. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7), 655–666. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2015.1127928
Krause, L. S. (2022). Relanguaging language from a South African township school. Multilingual Matters.
Lane, P. and Wigglesworth, G. (2022). From ‘civilising missions’ to Indigenous language reclamation: Language policy, language shift, and maintenance in Australia and Norway. In U. Røyneland and R. Blackwood (eds), Multilingualism across the lifespan (pp. 124–143). Routledge.
Lim, L. (2009). Beyond fear and loathing in SG: The real mother tongues and language policies in multilingual Singapore. AILA Review, 22, 52–71. https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.22.05lim
Lomeu Gomes, R. (2018). Family language policy ten years on: A critical approach to family multilingualism. Multilingual Margins, 5(2), 50–69. https://doi.org/10.14426/mm.v5i2.98
Lomeu Gomes, R. and Lanza, E. (2022). Southern approaches to family multilingualism. In S. Makoni, A. Kaiper-Marquez and L. Mokwena (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Language and the Global South/s (pp. 285–296). Routledge.
Makalela, L. (2019). Uncovering the universals of Ubuntu translanguaging in classroom discourses. Classroom Discourse, 10(3–4), 237–251. https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2019.1631198
Makalela, L. (2009). Unpacking the language of instruction myth: towards progressive language in education policies in Africa. In K. Prah and B. Brock-Utne (eds), Multilingualism: An African advantage (pp. 170–194). CASAS.
Makoe, P. and McKinney, C. (2014). Linguistic ideologies in multilingual South African suburban schools. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 35(7), 658–673. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2014.908889
Makoni, S. (2002). From misinvention to disinvention of language: Multilingualism and the South African Constitution. In S. Makoni, G. Smitherman, A. Ball and A. Spears (eds), Black linguistics: Language, society and politics in Africa and the Americas (pp. 1–19). Routledge.
Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (eds). (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Multilingual Matters.
Maldonado Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 240–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548
Maseko, B. and Mlilo, S. (2022). Family language policy, school language practices and language socialisation among the Tonga. South African Journal for African Languages, 42(2), 225–233.
Maseko, B. and Mutasa, D. (2019). ‘Only Tonga spoken here!’: Family language management among the Tonga in Zimbabwe. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 37(4), 289–302. https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2019.1692676
McKinney, C. and Molate, B. (2022). Coloniality and family language policy in an African multilingual family. In L. Wright and C. Higgins (eds), Diversifying family language policy (pp. 257–276). Bloomsbury.
McKinney, C. (2017). Language and power in post-colonial schooling: Ideologies in practice. Routledge.
Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.
Mignolo, W. (2018). Foreword: On pluriversality and multipolarity. In B. Reiter (ed.), Constructing the pluriverse: The geopolitics of knowledge. Duke University Press (pp. ix–xvi). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478002017-001
Molate, B. (forthcoming). Languaging and the making of ikhaya: A case study of family multilingualism in South Africa, PhD thesis, University of Cape Town.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The language of African literature. James Currey.
Ochs, E. and Schieffelin, B. (2008). Language socialization: An historical overview. Encyclopedia of Language Education, 8, 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30424-3_193
Offiong, A. and Mensa, E. (2012). Language choice and family language policy in inter-ethnic marriages in South-Eastern Nigeria. Studies in Literature and Language, 4(2), 107–114. Retrieved on 4 November 2023 from http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/sll/article/view/j.sll.1923156320120402.3540
Oostendorp, M. (2022). Linguistic repertoire: South/North trajectories and entanglements. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 17(4), 298–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2023.2207071
Philip, K. (2014). A history of townships in South Africa. In S. Mahajan (ed.), Economics of South African townships: Special focus on Diepsloot (pp. 31–49). The World Bank.
Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, eurocentrism and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from the south, 1(3), 533–580. https://doi.org/10.1177/02685809000150020
Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2), 11–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353
Ruíz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE: The Journal for the National Association for Bilingual Education, 8(2), 15–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/08855072.1984.10668464
Santos, B. de S. (2016). Epistemologies of the South and the future. From the European south: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities, 1, 17–29. Retrieved on 4 November 2023 from https://unescochair-cbrsr.org/pdf/resource/Epistemologies_of_the_South.pdf
Siqwana-Ndulo, N. (1998). Rural African family structure in the Eastern Cape province, South Africa. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 29(2), 407–417.
Spolsky, B. (2004). Language policy. Cambridge University Press.
Tusting, K. (2018). The linguistic ethnography forum. In S. Hållsten and Z. Nikolaidou (eds), Explorations in ethnography, language and communication (pp. 7–8). Södertörn University.
Veronelli, G. A. (2015). The coloniality of language: Race, expressivity and the darker side of modernity. Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, 13, 108–134.
Wade, F. (2018). Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the tyranny of language. New York Review of Books, 6 August. Retrieved on 4 November 2023 from https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/06/ngugi-wa-thiongo-and-the-tyranny-of-language
Wei, L. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx044
Wright, L. and Higgins, C. (eds). (2022). Diversifying family language policy. Bloomsbury.
