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Chapter 11 - Multilingualism in South African Education: A Southern Perspective

from II - Sociolinguistics, Globalisation and Multilingualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2019

By
Kathleen Heugh  and
Christopher Stroud
Edited by
Raymond Hickey
Raymond Hickey
Affiliation:
Universität Duisburg–Essen
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Summary

In this chapter, we contextualise English within a decolonial perspective of multilingualism in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly South Africa. In so doing, we lay bare some of the historically invisibilised circuits of intellectual exchange flowing from the geopolitical South to the geopolitical north around multilingualism. After a short overview of the deep decolonial roots pertaining to discussions of African multilingualism, we move to a discussion of multilingual education with the circumstances of the early 1990s in which at least three views of multilingualism in education circulated. We conclude by drawing attention to two notions in particular with ‘southern’ origins – ‘functional multilingualism’ and ‘linguistic citizenship’ – that we believe contribute to serious discussions of North–South engagement on understandings of multilingualism and multilingual education.

Keywords

functional multilingualismlanguage as resource linguistic citizenshipdecolonialsouthern
Type
Chapter
Information
English in Multilingual South Africa
The Linguistics of Contact and Change
 , pp. 216 - 238
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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